"Democrats should aim to be in a position to win Senate majorities without desperate gambits, to meaningfully contest state offices in all fifty states, and to make blue areas thriving magnets for people and capital requires a bigger program of party renewal."
Straight into my veins, Matt.
Democrats sometimes forget that "You play to win the game", as Herm Edwards said. The game is to win Senate and House seats (for Congress) and to win the Electoral College (for the Presidency). That's it. Pick positions that will win the game.
That means matching the cultural and policy priorities of lots of people in states that disagree with the cultural and policy positions of people in NYC, LA, SF, DC and BOS. Less focus on climate change, gun control and racial essentialism and more focus on government efficiency, equality of opportunity and immigration enforcement. Less hectoring, more encouraging.
Seconded. I particularly like how reframing the game around winning Senate seats rather than a narrow focus on the presidency crystallizes the necessity of a party that's heterogenous and small-L liberal. Deeply internalizing that Democrats will need to champion people who can win in West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Utah, and anywhere to the right of the median voter gives one a gut level understanding of how big the tent needs to be.
Of course, this will lead squabbling about what the core tenets of being a Democrat are, which I suppose we will claim are contained in the Commonsense Manifesto.
And for progressives who might be bummed out about that fact, their consolation should be that they actually were very effective at moving Democrats to the left! Now, there must be a natural reaction to the center.
And then, my bet is that there will be another big expansion of the welfare state triggered by AI job replacement. History is long and left policy will live to fight another day.
I doubt AI job replacement will lead to an expansion of the welfare state—at least in the early stages of this technology rollout—because it’s initially targeting workers in the upper middle class. These displaced workers could likely find some alternative employment that pays better than long-term welfare ever will.
For example, I imagine every knowledge worker could be a low-level manager overseeing minimum-wage workers at any such business because it mainly requires rule-following and enforcement. Even someone with substandard social skills can engage in the simple management directives needed in such roles. They may even take a passive-aggressive approach, primarily providing feedback over text/email or printing out yet another page of instructions to post in the workplace.
Yet I don’t think these formerly upper-middle-class workers (or aspirational ones if just at the beginning of their careers) will be satisfied with either unskilled supervision or welfare because of the status implications. There may be some Luddite attempts to limit AI proliferation to protect certain careers (e.g., local government employees or medical professions) as well as new make-work jobs, possibly in NGOs. Yet those will be far more expensive than traditional welfare and will likely be limited in their proliferation.
It could be a particularly turbulent time in terms of social, economic, and political strife. The most fitting analog may be the industrialization of agriculture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, the vast majority of people were employed in some form of farm labor on small family farms. Yet industrialization radically changed the economic structure such that only large corporate entities could survive, as it required significant fixed-cost investments to produce agricultural products with far less labor and far lower marginal costs. Not only did this crush small family farm profits, but they couldn’t even collect sufficient revenue to cover the annual fixed costs necessary to sustain themselves. And most of these farms had debt, possibly even mortgages on their land, which quickly ruined them as their incomes collapsed.
These workers and their families had to move to cities and seek employment in 1900s-era industrial factories. These were truly hell on earth. Just the visuals of open flames and dark, smoke-filled cavernous facilities met their conception of damnation. And they constantly risked gruesome injuries that could kill or cripple in novel ways—as they were reminded by personally witnessing such regular occurrences. Moreover, they were commonly working 60 to 80 hours a week for subsistence wages, even compared to their recent experience with the sparse living of independent family farms. Fortunately, subsequent technological, political, and social advances greatly improved the worker experience of industrial labor.
Hopefully, any future AI-fueled labor market disruptions aren’t as terrifying as that. At a minimum, we’re a far wealthier society. Yet there will be the novel social and political question of how to handle the rapid loss in status of previously upper-middle-class workers. Who knows how that will go.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that genuinely skilled knowledge-workers are going to very much being subjected to mass downward mobility where the predominant option is to go manage service workers. For one thing, management is actually a different skillset from most knowledge jobs.
Exactly, and while I’m a tech worker who did turn out to have the skill to move to management, I only do well because I manage skilled people. I don’t want to manage a group of unskilled people (developing a junior member of my overall skilled team is different than this) and there will be a revolt of the petit-bourgeois if so many lose income and status.
Yes, and on top of that, the service workers can totally tell when we've got some bigshot egghead who thinks they know how to (say) run a grocery store but doesn't even have calluses on their hands from breaking down pallets and mopping bathrooms. Instead of One Of Us, who rose up through the ranks like any other grunt, even if it was at some other retail company. It's just really hard to bridge that class gap. If such a person arrives at the position out of loss and bitter resentment, well, all the harder. And at least at my company, compensation for managers is dictated by the feedback of us frontline grunts, so they actually do need to put in the effort to be likeable rather than imperious.
And on top of that, I expect that once they start trying to routinely use AI to cut their knowledge-worker headcounts by, say, 90%, they're going to start finding out how bad AI sucks at a lot of things.
So it'll be yet another episode of Capital enshittifying products to deskill jobs to lay off workers to nobody else's benefit.
What do you think will happen in a world where AI is smarter than all white collar workers? When your skills are no longer special their value goes down.
“AI will fully replace knowledge workers but not be able to manage low-level service workers” doesn’t really make sense unless you assume that it will never be deployed in systems that can observe and interact with the material world. For that matter, I’d also expect cost-effective knowledge worker-equivalent AI to solve robotics very quickly (if the problem is solvable in principal, throwing the equivalent of an arbitrary number of superhuman and instantaneously communicating scientists at it will probably have major effects).
I broadly agree with you on this one. Unfortunately, even an AI agent that’s “only” smart human-level on individual tasks will be effectively superhuman (because they’ll be tireless, faster than us, not as easily distractable, not as bandwidth-constrained in communication, etc.)
I don’t think anyone should derive consolation from the fact that moving Democrats to the left made them so toxic that Americans ended up giving Trump a second term.
To be fair, there would be plenty of room for progressives on a more local level, and they still influence Democratic policy. They just can’t dictate it in this context.
If, in the end, you have uncompromisable principles that you can't win an election on, then electoral politics isn't the place for you. Go form a campaign group, convince people of your principles, build up support, gather together those who agree with you. There's a reason Martin Luther King never ran for office: he knew he would lose and that, in losing, he'd set back Civil Rights.
"There's a reason Martin Luther King never ran for office...."
and it's pretty much the same reason that he cited Socrates as his model when sitting in the Birmingham jail. Moral absolutism and politics don't go well together.
"Be sure, men of Athens, that if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself. Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time."
Animals have no rights and no moral weight, so there is no moral issue wrapped up in eating them except the working conditions of those who kill them for us.
A very good point. Remind me, were you the one who asked Matt Y in a previous mailbag how he reconciles eating meat with his moral standards and how to convince more people to become vegan?
The kinds of Democrats who run for statewide office in Mississippi are hardly left-wingers.
The last two Democratic gubernatorial nominees, for instance, were anti-abortion. One of them was the incumbent attorney general, a former district attorney with all of the strong law enforcement ties you would expect. The other was a state Public Service Commissioner who had made a name for himself fighting against utility price increases. Both focused on middle-of-the-road issues like Medicaid expansion, supporting education, opposing corruption, etc. And, ultimately, both won the same 46-47 percent of the vote against the same very disliked Republican governor.
Mike Espy, a US agriculture secretary under Clinton who had previously served as a moderate Democratic congressman known for reaching out across racial lines, turned in a similar showing against one of our Republican senators in 2018 (in a special election) and 2020. As did the previous viable Democratic Senate candidate in 2008.
So I don't think the problem in Mississippi is that Democrats run candidates who take positions that you just can't take here or have biographies that are alien to the median Mississippi experience. And I think the story is the same in most red states--especially most Southern ones.
A much bigger issue, as I see it, is that the very slim odds of statewide success put a huge damper on recruiting and party-building. If you're an ambitious young pragmatist (especially in a white district), running as a Republican is just a much easier path to an influential future.
This is a huge impediment to our country cultivating political talent. On the one hand, it was ridiculous that the mayor of South Bend, IN was running for president, but on the other, it was the only real way for a Democrat to raise their profile since such a person is not getting elected statewide.
I don't understand why Buttigieg moving to Michigan is strange to people. His husband is from Traverse City, his in-laws are still there, and they have young children.
To be clear, it's not a huge deal to me. Even by the standards of carpetbagging, it's not in the same ballpark as Hillary moving to New York in 1999/2000. I like Buttigieg and can easily imagine supporting him in a future Democratic presidential primary.
It's a good thought but here's my cold water about ability to actually achieve this. It has never been clear to me that the form of progressivism at issue has ever had much popular currency, even in those big coastal western and ACELA cities. What they do have is high concentrations of NGOs and educational institutions that are able to inject that sort of character into all of the Democratic Party affiliated institutions and organizations. They are politically safe and most people just aren't paying that much attention, though we have seen local rebellions when things get too out of control (various recalls and referendums on the west coast, Eric Adam's, etc.)
I think the nature of media and culture is that these ideas transmit out into the redder parts of the country, and even deep red states have blue enough enclaves producing people that follow those trends. Bottom line is I don't think it's enough to hope for heterodoxy. Someone is going to actually have to go into places in NY and DC and SF and BOS and wherever and throw out the Tema Okun obsessed, central planning and degrowth curious, people. They are entrenched and it will be very, very bitter.
As I've been saying since I came back, LBJ that shit. Burn the Groups to the ground, destroy the personal and professional lives of their senior staffers, offer the juniors a long road back to anything resembling important work or influence, send the survivors scurrying to create a Green Party that we can then hippy-punch to death and deliberately shun the 3-4 representatives that party manages to elect to the House.
The *only* way the electorate will believe we are not the party of stupid-ass, racial-caste, socialist-adjacent, degrowther leftism is if we loudly and virulently attack those morons at every turn, deliberately shoving that 2-3% of the electorate out the leftmost edge of the tent and into the cold to starve.
as one of the skeptical centrists whose votes dems need to win, i can attest to the truth of this. i gave dems the benefit of the doubt in 2018 and 2020, but won't be so eager to believe them again.
it's great to tell me what i want to hear to my face, but if you're lauding sanders, aoc and tlaib as soon as i'm out of sight, i'll reserve a very healthy skepticism about who you'll listen to post-election.
My BIGGEST beef with the Harris campaign is that it explicitly turned down multiple "Sister Souljah" moments to repudiate various toxic positions. UGH!
All said, the likely pain of the next four years not withstanding, Harris winning would have been WORSE for the "sane center"
Possibly, but giving Trump time to *fucking die already* might have made the overall pain to the country lower when the GOP inevitably won in '28.
I could deal with being in the wilderness if we're just talking normal GOP ass-backwards fiscal priorities and there being some effective deregulatory and compliance-simplification in there, but Trump's empowered people who can't even get the latter, traditional GOP strength, correct!
You know the DSA is a thing, right? You can hippie-punch them *right now*. They even lose elections half the time in the bluest of the blue neighborhoods in blue cities in blue states.
Or better yet, the PSL, who are actual fucking tankies.
I agree with you passionately on this point and yet we don’t really get along. That seems telling. I’ll freely admit I enjoy tearing down unworthy elites.
Just look at the reaction to Rep Seth Moulton in Massachusetts when he said he didn't want "formerly male" athletes competing in sports against his daughters. A lot of howling, clutching of pearls, outrage, etc from Dems up there. Just made the party look bad that he couldn't speak frankly and like a normal person on a 70/30 issue without getting that reaction (including from Gov Maura Healey, who I had thought was a talented, savvy politician). Entrenched and very bitter indeed.
Except for maybe Healey, the protests against Moulton just made the "Witch City" protesters look nuts and made him look sane by comparison. If we want to successfully moderate in the public eye, we need to not freak out every time a Democrat being moderate draws backlash from the left.
Maybe, but I believe the environment in which this conflict will occur has changed substantially since 2020 for a multitude of reasons. Notably, all political actors are increasingly constrained by the time and attention of others—including activists, funders, politicians, influencers, and ultimately the voting public. Even the X/Bluesky divide alone has greatly weakened the impact of 2020-primary-era progressive reach.
Add to that the ever-growing podcast and newsletter ecosystem, and it’s not obvious they can reach a significant number of sympathetic eyes and ears—especially when they may get more distribution through references to their thoughts and actions from critical venues, including Slow Boring and a multitude of publishers that range from the NYT-produced Ezra Klein Show to personalities and politicians on Truth Social.
Yes, many have institutional power and secured, long-term funding through NGOs and universities. Yet will it matter if their message is, at best, used as a foil by individuals and institutions promoting an alternative policy proposal? I.e., the Japanese soldier fighting WWII until the 1970s analogy.
Maybe some of us would appreciate a long and vicious fight with these adversaries. Progressive operatives stuck in 2020 thinking may similarly find meaning in that. Yet hopefully, most of us can get that out of our system without taking three needless decades. Like, would US/Japan relationship have been impacted in any way if a few GI’s joined their former adversaries in prolonging the Pacific theater conflict due to their residual enthusiasm for combat?
The last vote I cast in Massachusetts, in 2023, was to help Benjamin Weber replace Kendra Lara, who I had previously refused to support because she was DSA-endorsed. This was in one of the bluest areas of one of the bluest cities in the country.
I didn't follow this election because I lived in a neighboring city, but this sparked my curiosity, so I looked Kendra up: she seems to not be able to ever get her paperwork straight. Driving without a license, driving into a house, not able to file her address properly so may not live in the district. Was there any other interesting information about her?
Not to my knowledge. She really was just that lousy and initially got elected because she ran in a three- or four-way primary race backed by the DSA and their bunch. That was it.
Oh, I'm told she was responsive to labor concerns when serving.
At least less (no, zero) focus on HIGH COST measures to reduce CO2 emissions, like zero "McKibbenism" opposition to fossil fuel production and transportation projects, because they go against fast growth just like NEPA does.
Gun control should be a part of the focus on reducing urban crime and disorder.
Gun control is only credible if you are willing to aggressively police young, often black men, and put them in prison for a very long time over possession of an illegal handgun. Are you ready to do that?
Yes! Im a liberal who actually believes in gun control! Because young black men are also the most common victims of gun crime. And most young black men aren’t committing gun crimes!
If you're willing to put in the legwork to arrest people often enough, you don't even need the gun control or the long prison terms, just a large enough investigative arm and judiciary to make the administration of justice semi-certain and somewhat prompt.
Yea maybe it's just going to law school in Baltimore but I have developed what I believe to be a healthy skepticism of the power of writing words in a state code somewhere. The place to start is no nonsense enforcement of whats already on the books.
To me instead of focusing on new and/or mostly symbolic laws the question is how do we get smarter. Every time anyone does a deep dive into how black and grey market guns end up on city streets the source ends up being a shockingly small number of totally irresponsible and/or criminal dealers in low regulation states. Nevertheless they operate for years and years and years without anyone doing anything about it. These places can be shut down under long established, not particularly controversial, or constitutionally suspect laws. That has always struck me as a much more viable supply side strategy than, I dunno, parading out David Hogg again.
But also shockingly lax handling of guns by legal gun owners plays a part. I have a relative who until recently was an Assistant District Attorney in a place with loose gun laws. The number of cases she prosecuted that involved legally owned guns stolen from an unlocked car was shocking to me.
I find this similar to drug enforcement advocates who focus on “just a few” major gangs or cartels dominating various parts of the narcotics supply chain. Should we disrupt one, we’ll quickly find others—possibly even new entrants—filling the gap.
We could even imagine an increasingly decentralized supply chain where individuals with a clean-enough criminal record take the risk of laundering firearms from legal dealers to unknown individuals they meet through the internet. Would any state be open to imprisoning first-time offenders for such a crime? If not, many people may take the risk for a quick profit.
Similar to drugs, the core problem with illegal firearm possession is demand. In both cases, harsh punishment could reduce that demand, possibly by incarcerating individuals such that they’re unable to purchase either. Yet that is expensive and laborious, and many people find long-term lockups for simple possession of firearms unsavory—even for felons previously convicted of violent crime.
I also think though that the lawful manufacture and sale of guns affords a traceability that doesn't exist with narcotics. So yes, there is a point of diminishing returns but it's an imperfect parallel. As I understand it a significant portion of the guns on the streets of Baltimore 20 years ago were being traced to two or three ultra lax FFLs in the state. Now they're traced to a handful of FFLs down south. IIRC there was an article some years ago where they identified a particular shop where a guy with felonies was coming in very regularly, selecting the items for his 'girlfriend' to purchase, then transporting them up the highway.
I'm not saying we're ever going to prevent all gun crime. I'm just saying I don't see why we need to tolerate that kind of crap and in my experience the vast, vast majority of sellers do not operate in such a way. And I'm a gun owner! All it does is make my life harder.
Probably hard to do the swift and certain thing for something that requires a pretext stop. But I’m all about improving the swiftness and certainty of the justice system!
I think if we made apprehension and prosecution for possession of an illegal hand gun much more certain (I hope that is what you mean by "aggressive"), it would not be necessary to have long sentences. Long sentences cost a lot more and withdraw more person-days from the labor force than shorter sentences.
There is a certainly a cost effectiveness analysis to be done but it's important to be realistic about this. The experience over the last few years in DC suggests that perfunctory arrests or very short sentences are not a deterrent and putting people right back out results in nothing but that person re-offending. There is no free lunch on this and if we are going to say we care about this we have to be willing to spend money on people doing years behind bars over illegal possession alone, not weeks or months.
Yea I agree what they tried to do with that was ridiculous (it was held unconstitutional) but I don't think its unclear what an 'illegal' handgun is. It's a handgun in the possession of a prohibited person (NFA) or person who obtained it as a result of a straw sale. I guess in a way we're talking more about the individual than the object but that's a pretty pedantic complaint.
The notion that we should aggressively prosecute (violent)felon in possession laws seems obvious to me. Places that fail to do so are pretty baffling given that I don't even really think of that as being within the scope of "gun control". "Gun Control" is about what you can buy and where you can carry it and what paperwork you do or don't have to fill out, as a lawful citizen.
Once you're an adjudicated prohibited possessor you're kinda beyond the scope of gun control enforcement, you're just subject to normal criminal penalties.
Most of us don't care if our gun control is "credible." We just want to make our cities safer. This only requires reducing illegal guns on the streets regardless of the color of the hands carrying them and enforcing reasonable penalties.
Let's just ditch the words "gun control" and use the regular person words for this: "reducing crime". If you have to mention guns then it's something like "taking illegal guns from criminals" or "getting illegal guns off the streets" or whatnot. Dems Talk Like A Normal Person challenge.
The reason to properly fund, train, and operate law enforcement agencies is to get criminals with guns into prison. Making guns traceable is a bad idea.
"We're going to convince the people concerned with crime that what they really want is gun control" is a core dem delusion that needs to be be aggressively stomped out of existence if they're going to be competitive in the Senate. The various Bloomberg funded orgs are high on the list of "the groups" undermining the party's viability.
If they could develop a coherent statutory framework that might be the case. As it is, their framework is "ban anything we can get away with." Enhanced enforcement of the current status quo shit show actively harms their credibility.
I do not think the IS any coherent strategy for trying to restrict the supply of fossil fuels. All efforts should be on cost effective ways to reduce demand and encourage CCS.
I do actually think this part of the motivation behind the "Abundance Agenda" from Derick Thompson and Ezra Klein. Not just a good plan on the merits as far as encouraging economic growth, but a plan that could in theory peel off say 5% of Trump voters.
And then they'll lose the 2030 midterms by 20 points when the economy doesn't magically bounce back within 2 years because voters have the patience of a toddler!
We probably won’t see huge swings, but we’ll see small swings in votes and huge swings in power until one of the two parties figures out how to attract a large majority.
Yup. To continue the football analogy, if you consider yourself to be a running team but are playing a team with a good run defense, you may need to become a passing team that day or change your blocking scheme. Doesn’t make you any less of a running team…but you get no points for running the ball 40 times but losing the game vs. running it 20 times and winning.
At first glance winning Senate majorities with a 50 state strategy seems at odds with the idea of making blue areas thriving magnets. After all, it would be good if like a quarter of Seattle’s population moved to Wyoming to carpetbag and elect a Democrat.
But they aren’t, because the marginal person leaving a blue area due to bad governance is a disaffected conservative. Maybe not full on MAGA, but it’s almost always someone in the Republican tent. So while you occasionally hear people in Texas or Nashville bitch about California people driving up home prices and making traffic worse, what influx there is makes Senate polarization worse rather than better. People who vote blue, even if they’re upset with poor urban governance, are usually willing to tough it out because everything else is so much better.
I think a big problem with shifting left economically is that it doesn’t address what working class people actually want, and I think we can all agree that we need to win more of their votes.
You can ask working class people in NYC what their concerns are and they’ll tell you. Number one for them (like it is for everyone who lives here) is housing costs. Neoliberalism and big bad billionaires didn’t cause that - restrictive zoning did. You’re not going to fix that problem by attacking neoliberalism (whatever that means) or taxing billionaires more.
Another issue that working class people will cite is violent crime - again - this isn’t about billionaires - they aren’t going up to the Bronx and raping and murdering (billionaires do rape occasionally but prefer to do so on their yachts to vulnerable employees). Yet another issue is being able to ride the subway without having to worry about a crazy person pushing you on the tracks or being erratic in the train - these are not “neoliberal” issues - and they won’t be solved by taxing billionaires more or even executing them. The list goes on and on - they want good schools for their kids - and despite having some of the highest per-pupil spending in the country, NYC schools are not performing very well. Are you really going to tell me that taxing billionaires more and further increasing that spending another 10-20% will turn that around?
Again, I’m not opposed to trying to re-balance the economy to being less friendly to capital (we should definitely remove the carried-interest deduction) and more friendly to workers - but if you want the votes of the working class then I think you need to actually listen to them and respond to what they want.
OK, so I actually agree with you on all these concerns! I want affordable housing and less crime and clean, safe streets where mentally ill homeless people aren't peeing on the sidewalk and yelling at passerby! These are all good ideas!
The problem is, here we're discussing how to win federal elections (POTUS, US Senate). And the federal government just doesn't have a lot to do with local housing construction and law enforcement.
Forgive me for putting my elitist hat on, but this is why, for democracy to work, people have to have some basic understanding of our system of government! If people vote for a Republican President because they're pissed off at their mayor/city council, then that makes our job hella harder.
I know Matt Y has spoken about Democrats needing to focus on good governance in blue cities, and he's 100% right, but in the meantime, what does the working class want that THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT can provide?
Also! You mention housing costs as a big concern, and rightly so. The problem is, there are actually two constituencies here, with opposing goals: people who want to buy a house want cheaper housing, but people who *currently own a house* want their house to appreciate in value, i.e., want more expensive housing. Moreover, even people who are ok with building more housing in the abstract are not ok with building it next door to them (NIMBY is a thing for a reason). That doesn't mean give up on affordable housing, but it does mean that solving the housing problem isn't "super easy, barely an inconvenience!"
Having politicians talk a big game about solving problems is a good way to win elections, even if they have no power to solve the problems.
Talk about violent crime a lot, pretend to care, do some dumb performative stuff on TV, etc. Trump excels at this (and literally nothing else) and we can learn from him.
> Having politicians talk a big game about solving problems is a good way to win elections, even if they have no power to solve the problems.
Yes, but then you're screwed when the next election comes around and you've accomplished exactly none of the things you promised.
I think a decent chunk of the drop-off in Democratic turnout in 2024 can actually be attributed to this precise problem - if Biden's idiot campaign staff hadn't spent 2020 promising the moon, people wouldn't have had such unrealistic expectations.
Obviously you can't promise nothing, but sticking to more realistic low-key stuff is I think a healthier long-term plan.
(Of course if you don't care about the long-term, like Trump, then going wild does make a lot of sense)
The most frustrating part in some ways is early Biden Admin knew this extremely well with Covid Vaccinations. They very deftly made broad public proclamations of a goal target for vaccinations, and then absolutely smashed those numbers and announced that they had smashed their numbers. Wash rinse repeat. There were even a few articles form annoyed public health workers saying they were lowballing for politics. But they kept doing it and it was the period of his highest popularity! Totally undercut by trying to be FDR later and instead moving Carter up in presidential rankings.
"Let's lower ourselves to the level of the bullshit artist who talks big about solving problems but in reality either doesn't solve them or makes them worse" is a way to win elections, but not one I can support without losing my soul.
Episode 492,358 in an ongoing series: Professional-class knowledge workers find the mechanics of politics distasteful and keep trying to get the politicians who represent them to act like soulless automatons, and it doesn't work.
I don't mean to single you out, but if you remember our discussion the other week about professional-class progressives throwing a shitfit in Philly over Parker, one of their major lines of "attack" is that she puts her name and face on shit and talks about all the things "her" city government is doing, and they think it's crass and tasteless. What it is, is the very essence of how democratic politics is supposed to work.
This is a weird and unproductive hang-up to have. No one is asking you to make shit worse, just let the politicians talk about problems at every level and put pressure on their own party's local and state electeds to fix shit at every level, then loudly take credit for successes at every level.
I guess I'm expressing myself really badly, because we're talking past each other.
I never, ever said I want politicians to act like soulless automatons. Passion in a good cause is a good thing! Obama was passionate!
In my previous comment, I wasn't objecting to your mayor talking up her successes and demanding solutions. Good for her! I was objecting to "let's learn from Trump, who lies every single time he opens his goddamn mouth."
Example time:
Good: Mayor of Philly saying, "During my term as mayor, crime fell by n% thanks to xyz actions I took! Reelect me, and I will work to make it fall further AND I will get the homeless off the streets!"
Bad: Mayor of Philly saying, "Reelect me and every child in Philly will receive a magic sparking unicorn pony! And we'll make Pittsburgh pay for it"
Separation of powers amongst jurisdictions is fine for policymaking but just doesn't matter at all for politics, and we need to get over that instead of, as you did above, complaining about it.
I think it's quite clear that local blue city and state governance reflects quite strongly on the national brand.
If people see news stories about blue city disorder, they punish the national blue politicians.
When people see stories about crazy DEI stuff (especially in public schools), or antisemitism on campus, they punish the national democratic party
Democrats are supposed to be the party of making government work for you to solve problems. But in the bluest areas where they have complete control they have been REALLY failing.
You do have a good point on the NYMBY issue. The solution of course is actually reaching out to those evil big businesses and developers to push it through. That way you cross party buyin.
YIMBYism strikes me as similar to nuclear power: it requires a certain ability to prioritize thought over emotions, and thus its supporters seem to mostly be technocrat types. YIMBYism is fairly disruptive, so supporters also have to be OK with that. This is inherently a pretty small group.
I'd be open to discussing the pros and cons, but I have a feeling that it would be hideously unpopular in the US, and with good reason.
Now that we have a vindictive POS as POTUS, would I trust the federal government to take good care of zoning? Heck no! I picture Trump and Musk saying to each other, "How else can we make libs cry?" "I know, let's stick Boston and NYC with completely stupid zoning regulations!"
I've never understood why Leftists don't frame housing costs and restrictive zoning as a part of neoliberalism, except that they're all homeowners. Because it *absolutely is*! Restrictive zoning is part of the glue that keeps the deflationary coalition together, maintaining political support for the neoliberal order: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/deflation-inflation/
I just think that today's self-declared "Neoliberals" find themselves in fights with self-declared Leftists on city councils about housing, and project that back into the past rather than admitting that their own coalition (the suburban, highly-educated professionals of the Democratic Party) was essential in passing NIMBY policies. The Leftists are happy to polarize this way because it also exonerates *them* for supporting NIMBY policies.
I think one thing this misses is the popular assessment of Obama. Matt correctly sees Obama and the Obama governing agenda as essentially moderate, but most liberals, outside of a few think-tanks that Matt interacts with much more than the general public do, still think of Obama the man as the image they developed of him during the 2008 primary, a pretty radical left-winger who was, however, constrained by the realities of politics into a more moderate agenda than he would have personally preferred.
They saw him mouth the words of preferring civil unions to marriage equality and eventually see Biden drag him into aligning his public position with the private one they all believed he already had and think that applied to him much more broadly than it actually did/does.
And I think this shows in large part why the left was so much more prepared to accept moderation from Obama than from Biden. When they heard Obama make moderate statements they believed they were a political judgement. They thought that Obama didn't actually believe his moderation, but was saying and doing moderate things because they were the maximum he could actually get done. They fear from Biden or Harris that they are saying and doing moderate things because they actually believe in them. The complaint will be not that Obama was unable to deliver a public option or medicare for all, but that Biden or Harris doesn't really want to do that; they just want to maintain the corporate insurance-based medical system. And the same on other issues.
This, by the way, is why during the 2018 campaign, there wasn't a leftist revolt against Kyrsten Sinema, who was running a very moderate campaign on the issues. Because she's a bisexual former Green, they just assumed that her moderation was insincere. That's also why she provoked so much revulsion later on: they thought she was a disguised leftist lying to the moderates, so when she turned out to be a sincere convert to moderation, that felt like a betrayal, as if she had lied to them that she was really with them (which, of course, she had never actually done).
But this is what the left wants from a moderate: a moderate whose moderation is entirely strategic and insincere, and that means enough background in the left that they can believe (truthfully or not) that they are, in fact, a leftist who is faking moderation in order to deliver the leftest agenda that is politically possible.
Yes, this is fundamentally about tribalism and identity. It’s actually less about what you accomplish and more about what side you are on. Certain identities are assumed to be positive and others negative.
If it's about identity groups, it's interesting that Obama, as a mixed-race black/white man, was given more leeway to be moderate (by the left) than Harris, a mixed-race black/South Asian woman who campaigned in the 2020 primary on positions well to the left of Obama. Meanwhile, actual moderates found Obama's moderation more credible than Harris's.
I see it as a sign that the left wing of the Democratic Party was just far more radicalized in 2020 and '24 than they were in '08. But also, like Oliver's comment below, it was a shift "far more in the direction of weirdness than sincere leftwingness" -- staking out increasingly extreme and unusual rhetorical positions, rather than commitment to achievable left-aligned policy goals and a pragmatic plan to achieve them.
Look at the backgrounds, though: Obama was a community organizer and a law professor and a State Senator before he ran for the US Senate. Harris was DA for SF and then AG of CA.
One of those is a background where you'd expect a deep-rooted sincere leftist pretending to be moderate: the other is the background of a sincere moderate pretending (in 2020) to be more left than she actually was.
Makes sense -- although, by 2024, being a prosecutor from SF no longer seemed to the median American like a credible signal of genuine moderation. Anywhere else would have ben better, or any election cycle where there wasn't recent news about California prosecutors' choice to permit shoplifting.
Great point, she was a normal prosecutor, but the contemporary image of an SF prosecutor is still Chesa Boudin for most people. I wonder if it would have helped for her to endorse the recall of Boudin. It would have drawn criticism, but would have been a strong signal. A more likely opportunity was to endorse Prop. 36 in 2024. It still blows my mind that she didn't do that.
Yeah, I think the changes to the Left between 2008 and 2024 make a bigger difference than specific differences between Obama '08 and Harris '24. The Sanders losses in 2016 and 2020 fed a grievance identity and an adverse relationship with the party between the Left and mainstream Democrats.
The biggest reason Sinema didn't draw as much attention in 2018 was the fact that that race just also had low cultural salience among the people who were obsessed with AOC that cycle.
Harris is a former law enforcement professional with a 2009 book entitled “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer”. The left would more easily trust JD Vance as their future standard bearer.
It's always interesting what things are political shibboleths and which aren't and when and how they change. It will be very interesting to see how attitudes toward what is critical to being left-wing or progressive change on specific issues: criminal justice reform, taxes, health insurance, Gaza, Russia, China, etc.
I think people wanted Obama as a remedy. I was eager to vote for a black man, for instance, because I thought it was an important step forward for the country. And he did run a pretty damn good campaign in my memory at least.
The way I would put it is that it's about trust. If Obama says "this is the most I could get", then leftists will largely believe him. If Biden says the same, then a lot of leftists will think he could have gotten a better (ie more left) deal but left that on the table because he didn't personally support it.
Yes, this is exactly it! Remember those bumper stickers about Obama in '08, "Time to get disappointed with someone new!" Obama started out with a lot of trust. I still don't completely understand it.
I mean that’s really the whole deal with representative government. It’s not like I get intelligence briefings or have economic advisors or what have you. So I try to elect someone who I think shares my values that I have reason to think would respond to the unexpected like my best self would, like Obama.
It turns out this is really imperfect. Like Obama had great morals and political instincts but not the best foreign policy instincts, etc. But he at least approached situations from what I believe to be the right standpoint.
As someone who worked on Sinema’s campaign in 2018, I can say that yes everyone thought she was a leftist underneath, and now with the benefit of Yglesias thought, my disappointment in her is actually more about her not appearing to have any discernible strategy or goals at all!
Don’t Obama’s successes with moderates and cross-pressured voters suggest he was actually perceived as moderate? If people saw him as a lefty faking moderation then real moderates would’ve been much more skeptical of him.
I don't disagree. AOC is the one of the only dems my mom and my sister both like. My mom is an old school party line dem who owns a Mayor Pete t-shirt and my sister dislikes the democratic party and is suspicious of most democrats because she feels they are inauthentic/too corporate/too pro Israel. Both of them will of course vote for just about any dem nominee but with varying degrees of nose plugging. I think the question is how this kind of thinking about AOC can translate away from sure dem votes and into people who actually need convincing.
Another interesting character is Fetterman. He has such a strange grab bag of positions and his middle east politics are such a turn off to young progressives I think many of them might actually withhold a vote from him and instead let a generic R gain voteshare. But he certainly has the 'heterodox policies and not afraid to dunk on leftists' market cornered.
I think the strikingly successful campaign for gay marriage has misled progressives for the last decade. Gay marriage has to be one of the fastest changing yet sticky issues of the modern rights movement, and it convinced activists that they could bowl over all opposition and eventually their policies would both be popular and hard to dislodge.
First, it was pretty much all or nothing (you could have a compromise civil union, but once you’ve let gay people get basically married it proved relatively easy to allow them to get actually married), it appealed to enlightened centrism (let gay people lead normal family lives) (this us why some gay people objected), and once in place it was clear the only people negatively affected were people with moral objections, which most Americans didn’t think warranted banning the whole thing.
We are still ironing out the edges of public accommodation vs conscience rights but otherwise it has been an amazing success.
However, a lot of progressive priorities, like trans access to single-sex spaces and race-conscious programs, are more like immigration and abortion, which are perennial issues of compromise and shifting centers.
First, there are various compromises that are stable in themselves or at least don’t tend to flip all the way to one side. No modern country has fully opened borders, and most have some limits on abortion. There’s some compromise possible between “Sarah McBride has to use the men’s bathroom” and “it’s legally required to let someone with a dick use your female-only spa” (which is the current policy if Washington state: https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-washington-spa-fights-antidiscrimination-laws-at-ninth-circuit/)
Second, there are people who are hurt by the progressive policy who are more sympathetic to a mass audience than the people who believed allowing gay marriage hurt their own marriage. Immigration can and does overwhelm communities, abortion ends something that could have become a child, there’s all the women who won’t use a spa if they are required to experience what we used to call indecent exposure. Some people will decide some or all of these are acceptable losses, but you won’t get the mass, stable shift like you saw in gay marriage because not everyone will agree.
Most causes are not gay marriage, and treating them like it has been a disaster for progressivism.
Very true, but with an interesting twist: coming up through the Left is a decades-old, traditional path to middle-of-the-road Democratic politics, which Leftists nonetheless keep insisting they despise even as they reenact it.
I honestly don’t know what her deep personal political positions were. Her politics made no sense in terms of any objective (not in terms of “getting gratitude from rich people”, not in terms of a coherent leftist or centrist political approach, not in terms of getting re-elected).
Frankly, I think she was just a bad political strategist who was flailing around.
From what I can tell, her most consistent trait in Congress was really enjoying the activities of the wealthy (fashion, the weird winery internship, performative fitness)
While the shift amongst Democrats since 2016 has been leftward it is far more in the direction of weirdness than sincere leftwingness. Central planning gets houses and nuclear power while the left drift among Democrats is philosophically opposed to top down organisation and overruling any group of stakeholders. There seem to be a philosophy that any kind of compromise is bad that leads to attacks on moderates, no discussion of necessary tradeoffs and makes obstructing imperfect policies the default.
Some Democrat infrastructure involves odd and insincere people: prison abolitionists, degrowthers, land acknowledgers, who don't seem to have any point or link to left wing politics other than to drive people to the GOP and the Dems do a lot of damage by not driving them out.
Zahran Mandani, the DSA mayoral candidate in New York, is running a campaign very focused on lowering prices. That's it. Now, I think when pressed on issues like defund the police, land acknolwedgements, etc. he's obviously pro, but he is centralizing very material issues in a typical leftist way.
Obviously, he'd be a terrible choice for NY mayor and would probably bankrupt the city, but he's stirring enthusiasm because he is breaking from some parts of the hard left.
How does he and others in that position square that circle?
If someone on the campaign trail asks him if sex criminals or people with illegal guns should be in prison what does he say? Or does he never meet people who might ask that fairly obvious question?
I once asked a prison abolitionist and he got angry and explained a policy that sounded exactly like prison as an alternative.
A lot of these people get their power from moderate Democrats taking a "go along to get along" approach to online weirdness. What constituency do land acknowledgers really have? Who would miss them when they're gone?
None, not even Native Americans. I hadn’t seen one since the DNC, until going to see the symphony a couple of weeks ago. It’s a pointless exercise, but I guess maybe it helps some of the mostly privileged people attending the symphony feel good about themselves.
The first time I saw one, it was on a PBS video on paleontology. I originally guessed that it meant that the discoveries were made in either the 18th or 19th century specifically with certain Native American groups were being forced off of their land. When I realized what it actually meant, it was second-hand embarrassing.
I'd like to see Matt write a "mainstream Democrats are good" series. The crux of the left's critique isn't about winning Ohio, it's that Democrats are proven failures. Their narrative is that all moderation achieves is surrendering in advance on policy in service of electoral outcomes no better than a coin toss.
In the real world, Obama was a two-term president who permanently expanded the welfare state, oversaw progress on social justice, and raised taxes. Clinton was the same. Biden involved Bernie and Warren to an unprecedented extent and we all know how that ended. But a lot of these folks don't seem to know that, and if you lose that debate, it's hard to persuade them of anything else.
Now, maybe they don't know because they don't want to know. They prefer to live in a comforting fantasy where bad things happen because "neoliberals" are traitors and if "good people" just took over the Democratic Party all would be well. People like that are beyond persuasion. But I think most folks aren't like that, they just want to win, and they need to be explained why Biden and Hillary don't show that mainstream Democrats are failures.
I think it is important to remember a lot of them are just odd people who object to compromise and think that failing to press the magic "solve all problems button" is because moderate Dems are evil and corrupt.
Man, I try to stay out of this stuff, but I read some moderate version of this statement in these comments every day. "Everything I think is moderate and common sense, and correct, and isn't implemented because those kids on the left are stupid and illogical."
Matt wrote: "So unlike the needless post-Obama ideological pivot, Democrats now actually do need a pivot. A pivot away from the fuzzy semi-embrace of central planning and modern monetary theory ...". Bernie’s 2016 economic advisor was Kelton. I'm just reading that as shots fired by Matt at Bernie and I fully agree.
Even having involved the Warrenites heavily and embraced "social justice" enough to lose 2024, Biden passed some useful technocratic policy tweaks, improved nutrition support for the poor, expanded healthcare access for the middle class, improved the functioning of the IRS and Medicare, and invested in domestic manufacturing and energy.
Of course, because he gave the rest of the administration over to the Warrenites and the illiberal racialist left, we lost in 2024 and many or most of those gains will be rolled back, and then some.
Did Bill Clinton permanently expand the welfare state? I was too young to understand politics when he was president, but I thought he was known for working with the new Republican majority in the House to reduce and restructure public aid and "end welfare as we know it." He also reduced expenditures in economic boom times, and ended his presidency with a rare government budget surplus.
For sure any (two-term) President's record is broader than the sentence I gave it above. I was referring to Children's Health Insurance Program. Biden does not have a comparable achievement AFAIK.
I think the Democratic brand is in a dangerous spot w/r/t the daily DOGE news, and risks stepping on the rake and their 2026 campaign message.
The news making it to the low-info swing voter is "richest guy on the planet who has made cool stuff is firing a bunch of bureaucrats who work on stuff that doesn't matter to me, and finding a bunch of waste. He's pretty smart and has made cool stuff, so that's probably a good idea".
The current counterarguments on offer:
1) every agency you've never heard of is really important because reasons
2) its so unfair that bureaucrats are getting fired (only liberals/the left seem to care about this)
3) He's breaking the law (only liberals/the left seem to care about this)
4) He's taking power that belongs to Congress (only liberals/the left seem to care about this)
It seems to me that a better argument from a 2026 or 2028 hopeful is "drug-addled Elon is letting his concubines break a bunch of shit so he and Trump can steal from you without getting caught. Here are some examples of how the broken shit is affecting people like you, and how they are stealing." This argument is best made by a person with a high-level private sector background (a CEO/executive). None of the idpol stuff matters. The small-bore micro legislation you want to champion doesn't matter.
"drug-addled Elon is letting his concubines break a bunch of shit so he and Trump can steal from you without getting caught. Here are some examples of how the broken shit is affecting people like you, and how they are stealing."
It'll come down to whether Trump/Elons tactics cause problems people can feel or not. I think they will, and that'll be the opportunity for Dems. If they don't, well...I'll change my mind on how wrong Trump and Elon are*.
*Though not about a. problems it causes for non-voters - I think the callousness toward, say, African children with HIV is grotesque, and; b. problems that aren't felt for 4+ years, like destroying our anti-China alliances.
1b) That agency you claim you've never heard of runs IMPORTANT THING in your state and country which creates THIS MANY jobs for your community and if THEY ALL GET LAID OFF it's gonna really suck FOR YOU.
The lack of normie backlash to DOGE really makes me think Matt’s ideas of relocating government offices to different locales that aren’t DC is fundamentally a good idea. It’s easier to wish ill on people that aren’t people to you, it’s harder to support the layoff of your neighbor.
Unless you have some information about Musk's personal relationship with members of the DOGE team that's been overlooked by the rest of the media, I'm pretty sure "concubines" isn't the word you're looking for there . . . .
At least for me, the most damning aspect is the completely haphazard nature of it all. I'd at least hear them out if there was a coherent strategy behind it. But who really thought we had a glut of park rangers ffs?
I’ll use the Tim Miller standard, Democrats need to find candidates who can hang out comfortably at an SEC tailgate party.
The more they can act and especially talk like normal people the better. Those are real voters who care about real issues. Not progressive activists online.
This is true, but I think the emphasis on who you hang out with and how you talk can also serve as a way of detracting from the importance of policy stuff.
To Meghan's point, I think that, provided that they hew closer to your CSDM, Democrats are quite keen on emphasizing policy, more so than Republicans. But I can see room for improvement in being a natural in normie spheres who aren't polticial junkies.
I agree with Meghan (and you) that there’s a *lot* of room for improvement in this area. Most people aren’t political junkies and have muddled views on policy. A normal person who can frame policy goals in terms that normal people can relate to is a good candidate.
I didn't know the Securities and Exchange Commission threw tailgate parties! (Ok I'm being snarky, I genuinely don't know what SEC means in this context. Football something?)
Anyway, "just appeal to real people on real issues" is a great idea that starts to fall apart when you look at it more closely.
The New York Times ran a series of interviews/focus groups with undecided voters in swing states before the election. The vast majority of these voters came across as decent, sincere people. But they were, there's no other way of putting it, woefully lacking in understanding of how our political system works.
They demanded solutions to problems that would have required an all-powerful dictator, not a president, to fix. They complained about stuff that was controlled by forces greater than any politician (like, pandemic supply chain disruptions) or, conversely, they complained about issues that are a matter for state and local governments, not POTUS, to fix. They took position A in one sentence, and in the next sentence they took position B that directly contradicts A, and they never noticed the contradiction. They said things like "I just want us to get back to being kind and polite to each other" and in the next breath they'd say they consider voting for Trump, the most unkind and rude candidate probably ever in the history of POTUS elections.
This is not to say "don't listen to real voters," but their ideas have to make some semblance of sense and be tethered to reality.
As for the essence of your comment, unfortunately these are the voters we have to deal with, and dealing with them means being able to engage in a fair bit of bullshitting. Yes, I don't like it either, and it's one of many reasons why I'd be a terrible politician.
The Southeastern Conference is the highest tier of college football teams in the South. (And the fans of those teams are notoriously quite assertive in thinking they're they're the highest tier in CFB period.) I've made similar snarky jokes as you did here before, but to when Matt and others refer to the Securities and Exchange Commission: https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-incredibly-dumb-economic-mistake/comment/70950230 (Getting that joke does require a little bit of college sports knowledge, though.)
I think you're very overly charitable. Googling "SEC tailgate" would answer the question and be much faster than the lame joke, and it would also not play into the "nyah nyah sportsball!" pablum that helps us LOSE ALL THESE FUCKING IMPORTANT ELECTIONS.
I'm struck by how I hear young men around me refer to each other sincerely as "bro" on a regular basis, young men of all racial backgrounds just casually talking--and someone pointed out that many progressives use "bro" pejoratively, especially online. We need to cut stuff like that out.
When I talk about overrated I mean things like the idea that the SEC could/should get all four 1-seeds.
The SEC is the best conference by a healthy margin this year, but is also overrated. The Big 12 has occupied this space in the past. If you avoid having terrible bottom feeders you create a situation where every loss has positive value.
The idea that Tennessee is 7-5 in conference yet deserves a 1-seed is absurd to me.
I feel pretty confident that we won't see more than one SEC team in the Final Four and no more than two in the Elite Eight. A team that the committee believes has 5/6 top teams in the country would be expected to surpass those results.
A break with Bidenism means that firing a bunch of people who took part in the last debacle. I'm 100% for it.
Everyone who played along with open borders, defunding the police, crazy trans things, and making everything about race should be told they're getting thrown under the bus by a new crop who can credibly say "Those Democrats made mistakes that we're not going to repeat."
It's worth remembering that Kamala's actual positions in her campaign were pretty moderate, but people (correctly) couldn't look past her past record. She didn't lose on her positions. She lost on her history.
If you had put those new positions on a new face without the baggage, that president would be wagging their finger at Putin and leading Ukraine to victory right now.
New positions on a losing team is not enough. Time to tell some people their political careers are over.
This gets at something both Matt and fellow former Milan employer Liam Kerr have talked about — there is no “Democrats Inc.” centralized entity which makes it hard to enforce a “don’t hire people who made X bad decision” rule.
I'm suggest people like Matt could have/should have written an essay saying "We can't regain trust with voters as long as our leaders are people swing voters will never forgive."
Voters and donors can come out and say they're not backing anyone who took part in the worst positions.
People with an audience should be making this point if they think it's correct, not lamenting nothing can be done.
That would be the “Throw Joe Biden under the bus” take from a few weeks back. I’m in full agreement with that take.
What I’m saying is that trying to ice out staffers who covered up Biden’s mental decline is tricky because it takes one group deviating to break the “don’t hire” equilibrium and there’s only so much you can do to punish the defecting firm.
Do I think it would be good to not hire the people who helped cover up Biden’s mental decline for high-level roles in the future? Yes. But I think it’s more important that elected leaders acknowledge the mistake than to ensure that every single deputy junior advisor to the senior advisor to the WHCOS never gets a job at any politics-related firm.
At this point I would be satisfied with elected officials and senior staffers acknowledging the mistake and having some sort of plan or process that ensures this doesn’t happen again.
The "throw Biden under the bus" is a stupid misdirection. To the extent Biden was a problem, he's history and will never matter again. We have to attack the leftist crazies, not use Biden as a scapegoat. And if you think the "hiding of Biden's mental decline" will be an important issue to any voter in the future, well, I don't know what to tell you other than, nah.
But I do totally agree that this election conclusively proved that the American people will never ever elect an ageing guy who has clearly slipped a lot mentally.
"To the extent Biden was a problem, he's history and will never matter again."
I'm curious how you would reconcile that with Matt's comparison of Trump throwing Bush under the bus. Would you have said about Bush in 2009, "To the extent [Bush] was a problem, he's history and will never matter again. We have to attack the leftist crazies, not use [Bush] as a scapegoat."
And yet it was that very insincerity that would allow leftists to look past the whole "Kamala is a cop" thing.
If she hadn't played along with all that stuff in 2020, then there would have been a much more robust left reaction against Harris as a candidate. The left (especially the Warrenite part rather than the Sandersite part) knows that their policy ideas aren't popular (they think that they will be popular when implemented as policy, and cite the ACA for that) so they expect to have a candidate whose past will convince them that the candidate is one of them but the candidate's public positions will be more moderate.
They expect the candidate to largely implement their public positions (which is why they don't think they are fooling the electorate), but to have instincts to push as far left as public opinion / political reality will allow - which requires the candidate to have internal beliefs well to the left of the public.
This is different from the more hardcore Sandersite left who expect candidates to make political statements of agreement with their left positions and to sell the left positions to the public - the candidate is a failure in messaging if they can't get voters to vote for those positions (which that part of the left holds as an article of faith are capable of being popular if messaged correctly).
As an aside, as defined here, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren themselves are neither Warrenites nor Sandersites: they're fine with a moderate who defines himself as a moderate, they're much more interested in substantive policy concessions than in "trusting" a candidate to believe the right things.
Gavin is definitely not going to appeal to working class voters. Hopefully John Fetterman fully recovers to the point where he can communicate effectively in a debate.
It's weird to call this "Bidenism" given that Biden has always been a center of the party guy and not some wild eyed leftist. It's more like a bank shot appellation, meaning that the party moved to the left and Biden, being in the center of the party, reflected that move.
Biden was a moderate in the 2020 primary campaign and only, against standard practice, moved to the left *after* winning the nomination. It's probably because he wanted to avoid the kind of tensions that afflicted the Hillary campaign facing disgruntled Bernie supporters and believed that keeping the Democratic coalition was the most important action needed to win in 2020.
Maybe that was wise and was needed for victory. I do wonder how history might have been different had Biden heeded his internal more moderate voice.
If Biden had just moved left after the primary and during the general campaign, it wouldn't have been great but probably would have worked out fine. But he kept moving left and governed much further left than people expected. It was the governance way more than the campaigning that turned people off.
A question that is honestly not meant to be snarky or despairing: does any of this matter for so long as the Republicans reliably win 60% of the national white male vote, as they reliably have in every election cycle, regardless of candidates, for, essentially, a quarter-century? In other words, exactly which voters comprise the key target audiences for Common Sense Democrats? While, standing to be corrected, I think it will still be awhile until we have the full Pew-run accurate demographic breakdown, we should still ask who are the reachable subset of the 1.5% of voters representing Trump's margin or the 236,000 swing-state voters who, had they voted differently, would have delivered Harris an electoral college victory (and popular vote loss - really something to imagine!). Are they cross-pressured white non-college-educated women? Hispanic men? The subset of Trump's seemingly increased vote among Black men not consisting of people in the military or employed in law enforcement? I don't mean to go from strategy to tactics, but I think that polarization may not be quite so elective as MY would like or quite so tractable by a D move to the center. The Democrats are a big-tent coalition now - everyone from Rockefeller Republicans to Maoists - so I think it is helpful to get some sense of who MY and the commentators think is movable.
I would think it’s more about turning out all the types who aren’t full MAGA, the ones who stayed home/those who are in the middle. Turnout was down in 2024. I would imagine the number of people in that group far outnumber the types who are now completely onboard the Trump train.
If you look closer at places like Miami (city proper), which had a huge shift towards republicans percentage-wise, it’s actually because 15-20 thousand some-odd democratic voters from 2020 stayed home, not that the GOP flipped all of them. The GOP did gain a few thousand, but if the Democrats had turned out roughly the same amount of people as 2020, or even 2016, it would not have been such a close result. Targeting those who, for whatever reason, tuned out and didn’t consider the democrats as viable this time, but aren’t necessarily wearing red hats, should be the goal imo.
I agree with you. I personally think Democrats have lost this group for at least a generation and will need to make it up by appealing very broadly to other demographics. I think they tried to do this in 2024 by being bullies about race and other identity matters, and it fell *incredibly* flat. But so did the more historically mainstream policy (re: the one of the aged Bidens and Pelosis of the world) of supporting Israel under any and all circumstances while they were mass bombing hospitals and schools in Gaza. So, there's clearly a lot of hairs to be split.
Did Gaza matter in this past election at all? Or any other foreign policy question? The two candidates were very different on their approach to foreign policy and some groups may have shifted their votes, but on balance it seems not to have mattered.
I don't think the *policy* question on Gaza mattered very much, for the reasons you state.
But I think the pro-Gaza protests, especially on college campuses, were negative for the Party. For right or wrong, the actions of the protesters and the ineffectual response by college administrators reflect on the Democratic Party.
Yes, this seems like a core problem where people who are not affiliated with a party directly are nevertheless seen as its representatives. The Democrats don’t have much direct influence on universities, and professors and students don’t feel any obligation to take into account electoral considerations. It would probably be better for everyone if both the Democrats and the universities made clear they are not affiliated with one another.
It is overused, as many references are, but I cannot think of a better opportunity for a Sista Souljah moment than the Gaza protesters.
Only Fetterman leaned into that stance. The rest of the politicians missed a perfect chance to make the message clear that those lunatics don't represent the views of the Party
Fetterman's favorability is up roughly 20 points since he just stopped acting like he believes everything that his Harvard-educated peers do and started trolling the leftmost of them.
He forms the empirical basis for most of my "just fuck the Groups over loudly and much else will sort itself out" stance.
Anyone who does lawless protest like blocking freeways and throwing soup on paintings should be Sista Souljahed to oblivion, regardless of their cause.
I see it slightly differently, but it might end up looking the same. It's bad for the Democrats AND universities for them to be closely identified with each other when they actually aren't linked directly in any meaningful sense, since there isn't really any way to cause feedback or process information between them. Making that clear might be in some sense a Sister Souljah moment. This is probably a small restatement of MY (and others') idea that polarization is a choice in some circumstances.
And now Fetterman's staffers are quitting en masse, because a lot of people working for Democrats sincerely expect that the game is to elect empty suits who will work for their staffers.
Sure, that would be good, but the idea of joining forces with Bibi is deeply nauseating. I'm not sure if the Democrats could pull that off.
The problem in the Israel-Palestine conflict is that there are no good guys, and it splits the Democratic coalition but not the Republican. There really weren't good options for the Democrats here.
There's also the fact that large societies need to be able to have conversations where the results don't immediately turn into a political party losing and someone like Trump getting elected instead. We're going to become an ungovernable country or another Peronist has-been otherwise. We need to be able to say "it's bad that the administrative state is being dismantled and American science research capacity is being gutted to be filled with cronies" without that turning immediately into "Democrats only care about unelected bureaucrats."
Weirdly, it seems that both strongly pro-Israel and strongly anti-Israel types turned against the democrats in this past election because of Gaza. I don’t know that it was hundreds of thousands of votes, but it was some prominent groups on both ends.
I don’t find it as obvious as Matt that the rejection of Biden was straightforwardly about policy, except on immigration. Perceptions of Biden seem tied up inextricably with his age, with led people to perceive him as weak and meant he wasn’t out there selling his policies and getting media attention for them. Perceptions of him were also impacted by inflation, which mostly was out of his control.
I think if Biden was 65 and inflation never exceeded 3%, but he otherwise enacted the same policies and used the similar rhetoric, he would have been much more popular and probably a favorite to win reelection. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to moderate on controversial issues, especially those trying to win in red states, but I’m not convinced that issue positioning is the main story here.
I tend to agree with this. I have a lot of relatives who voted for Trump and the two things I kept hearing from them were "Biden is senile" and "I really dislike illegal immigration."
Just moving more centrist on illegal immigration would help the Dems immensely.
I would like more discussion of this point because of course voters care about policy--they want the economy to be good, crime to be low, and health care to be affordable!...which is not particularly insightful. I'm not sure most voters care or think much about policy beyond "I care about the economy, tariffs are related to the economy, therefore Trump must be good for the economy since he's proposing to do stuff related to the economy."
Biden's big dip in popularity started with his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and never recovered.
Also, the most credible research shows that Biden's extra Stimulus added about 3% to the inflation rate.
Just as important once that inflation started showing up, did Biden change course? Did he pull back the extra giveaways (I mean stimulus). Of course not, he denied inflation was happening, and kept shoveling money out the door.
Now, Stoller himself is “anti-woke”. But Ryan Grim (Dropsite News) and Krystal Ball type Bernie deadenders have articulated a willingness to expand the tent to ppl who have different views on cultural issues like abortion, crime, and immigration as long as Dems impose stricter litmus tests on Econ and foreign policy. I’m not surprised they like Osborn. There’s def a strand of Econ leftists (Faiz Shakir recently) who view maximal cultural progressivism as a psyop by Hilary Clinton types to prevent expansion of the welfare state.
That's a fair point. I'm just saying, they were willing to settle for "Osborn agrees with us about this one thing." Forget culture, forget climate change, they weren't demanding he come out for Medicare for All or say we should abolish billionaires or whatever else the Bernie 2020 crew was after.
I think it’s because they viewed him as an opportunity to re-orient the main axis of conflict in American politics to be around class issues. Even heterodox Fetterman when confronted on the View if he’s planning to switch parties, resorted to his support for LGTB rights and abortion as to why he’s still a Dem. When asked about what drives Osborn’s politics, he emphasizes labor issues.
As you know, certain leftists care as much if not more about the type of coalition one assembles as they do about winning elections. They value getting back the Obama to Trump voter more than persuading the Romney to Clinton voters. Imo that’s what explains the Osborn love.
I don’t know if we can say that’s Osborn pandering or his sincere views on monopoly. I think Matt Stoller is incredibly annoying and a sloppy analyst who sees anything and everything through the lens of anti-monopoly, but it’s also true that anti-monopoly views are widely held, including by many conservatives. Just for most people they aren’t the be all and end all.
I think this is a little unfair, Osborn’s essentially pro-choice for one in the sense that he’s personally against abortion but thinks it should be left to the women and her doctor.
I will defend anti-monopoly policies as a long-run complement to other economic-left policies. Break up monopolies -> less monopoly rent -> big business interests and the super-rich have less money to buy media and politicians -> less structural resistance to subsequent redistribution, public services etc.
They're liberal but not left - not neoliberal, not whatever people mean by "liberal" in the modern sense, but what people meant by liberal when they'd call TR a liberal. Can I coin "archaeoliberal" for this tendency?
They are something that liberals of the right and of the left can agree on.
Sure, I was just pointing out that certain leftists care as much if not more about the type of coalition one assembles as they do about winning elections. They value getting back the Obama to Trump voter more than persuading the Romney to Clinton voters. Hence, the Osborn love.
They want to re-orient the main axis of conflict to be around class issues so are open to expanding the tent through cultural moderation as long as they can get rid of fiscal moderates and *neocons*. This is not representative of the left but is true of the ppl Matt cites in his piece as “leftist”. Here is a tweet from Ryan Grim (of Dropsite News):
“DEI was an active impediment to the project of building a multiracial working class movement capable of taking on corporate and oligarch power. Rufo did the left a favor in nuking it.”
Is it rlly a culture war issue besides Israel-Palestine? On most cultural war issues, the parties are neatly divided. That’s not true for foreign policy, and it’s certainly not obvious that the Obama-Trump voters in 2016 were turned off by Dem military dovishness as they were about say immigration. In fact, I think there’s more factional differences within parties and some overlap between left wing ppl who think our interventionist foreign policy is harmful to foreigners and America Firsters who think we should disengage bc it’s harmful to our own interests.
I think foreign policy consensus is mostly on the elite level. Even on Israel-Pal, I think it’s more generational than partisan. I would wager there are more older Dems who want to send aid to Israel than there are younger Republicans.
I think it's relevant that the Democratic collapse in the Senate, state legislatures, and in red states generally began under Obama--who I agree governed as a moderate. To me, that really complicates the notion that Democrats became unviable in such places because of post-Obama departures into DEI Land.
Yeah i think it has way more to do with the nationalization of politics than the way any particular democrat governed or ran, to be honest. West Virginians don't really care about the guy who brings home the bacon- they want a loyal soldier for their political values which are insanely right wing.
Ya think? I think that was just the Southern Strategy fully realized, which was always going to take a generation or two while those Dixiecrats who always voted for a Dem out of habit died off.
The Democrat majority Obama started with was an anomaly brought on by the great recession.
Also, while Obama was certainly a LOT more moderate than Biden, he was definitely more liberal than Bill Clinton, and drifted further left over those 8 years.
I'm pretty disillusioned with all this. Why don't we just get a television star to fart in people's faces or something? The idea that voters are being driven by sincere policy views, especially in a presidential election, doesn't seem to be substantiated. In a world where nothing matters and nobody cares about anything, you get authoritarianism, farce, or both.
I don't think it's true that Republicans voters aren't motivated by policy views. Their party is not motivated by making concrete plans for imposing those policies, rather than the political battle over the policies themselves.
But I do think that Republicans' concerns over illegal border crossings and gender/race ideology in school, for example, are genuine.
Then why is the narrative that inflation was the main driver this election? And the Biden admin and the party did pivot on immigration (but definitely way too late).
I've commented here before that if inflation really was the main issue, voters wouldn't have voted for Trump, as his policy agenda will do nothing to calm it and will actually just make it worse. People replied saying that's because the average voter doesn't understand tariffs or economic policy.
Fair enough. But if the voters don't understand or care about policy, then why all this handwringing about the correct policy platform going forward? The OP is right. I like Matt, but I think his manifesto is just missing the forest for the trees. The policies matter way less than the personalities.
Biden/Harris did pivot on immigration...sure. But, again, that pivot did not come across as genuine. Too little, too late. And this was after years of being lectured that "nobody is illegal", and that undocumented immigrants are essential for the economy, and that it doesn't matter how people came here. Voters felt they could trust Republicans on this issue more.
On inflation, voters could point to the large amount of spending and the years the Democrats were insisting that inflation was only due to supply chain issues.
I agree with you on inflation that Trump's policies don't make sense if you care about inflation. But you're conflating "don't understand" with "don't care about". Those aren't the same things.
Them not being the same thing doesn't really change the logic of policy positioning ultimately being a secondary consideration. Biden and the Democrats being untrustworthy on immigration might be true, but considering his opponent is a convicted felon and demonstrable pathological liar, it seems like a small quibble, and ultimately backwards reasoning.
US politics are basically just high school. Things are popular and salient until their not. The majority of the country was against gay marriage and immigration until they suddenly weren't, in a span of a single administration, and now the pendulum is swinging back. Democrats just need a slightly more moral, less unhinged candidate with lots of name recognition and who looks good on TV, those are by far the most important.
It sucks, because I'm here to read Matt, who I agree with, both substantively and in his approach. But people like him aren't the ones who win class president. Because it's just high school all the way down, and the Democrats currently aren't the cool kids like they were in 2008.
But don't you see, Trump voters cared more about immigration than Trump lying. For them immigration policy wasn't a quibble.
I mean if people wanted a more moral, less unhinged candidate with lots of name recognition and who looks good on TV, Kamala should have won. That describes her perfectly. Yet she didn't win.
No this is a bad reading. The biggest criticism of Kamala was always that she was extremely unpopular, which is a rare achievement for a VP.
That's the insight. Policies aren't popular, people are, and then those popular people change the narrative. The Republican party used to be in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship until Trump changed that. You could say it's because the population had a wellspring of nativist sentiment. But I actually think Trump himself is responsible for shifting the window on the issue, and mostly because he ended up being more popular than Jeb and Rubio in 2016.
Maybe the Biden/Harris pivot was too late and they were punished for that. But why wasn't Trump punished for his effort to sabotage the bipartisan bill to address the problem?
Sometimes it just seems that the voters are amorphously angry at their elected leaders and want to lash out. Like Marlon Brando asked what he was rebelling against and saying "Whatcha got?"
People don’t vote for someone because they are in fact proposing better policy on the issue that matters - they vote against the incumbent because they think the incumbent is bad.
Just like all the people who say things are so awful they’d rather tear it all down than try something better, not realizing how much worse it could get.
Voters don't necessarily know that Trump was going to drive up inflation, but it is true that inflation went up under Biden (not all his fault)
Having good policy planks may not help as much as we'd like on getting _initially_ elected, but if you have a better policy you'll probably get better outcomes and then you're much more likely to get re-elected.
I didn't say Republicans. Trump is funny and Harris was boring and every other take about the election is made up out of whole cloth or heavily retrofitted when the real explanation is way simpler. This is all dumb and fake. If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said illegal immigrants are actually good and he loves trans people, his polling wouldn't change a bit. Congressional republicans wouldn't even disagree with him publicly. We need to adapt to this reality instead of pretending
I don't want to be as pessimistic as you. This is my home! I don't just want to concede it to the MAGA forever and shrug and say, "welp, elections are unwinnable, we are screwed."
But there is something to what you say. Trump mimed giving a blow job to a mic at a campaign rally. He swayed to music for half an hour instead of giving a speech. And he got elected.
If Trump had farted in people's faces in public, his followers would declare it the best, greatest fart anyone has ever seen, and swing voters would shrug and say, meh, who cares, my eggs are too f**king expensive and I vaguely remember the economy being better under Trump in 2019, I'll probably vote for him!
+eleventy gigazillion on your last sentence; also, Old Ben Franklin was way ahead of you: "[our form of government] can only end in Despotism ... when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
I'd probably agree voters aren't driven by policy ... but they are clearly driven by issues. Trump won the economy and immigration. Harris won health care and the supreme court. The economy won this time. I think that's the Dems. big Achilles heel and also why I'm so interested in how Gov. Polis seems to have taken back this issue with small but consistent tax cuts. He's hyper focused on fiscal responsibility. In the same way Trump took entitlement spending off the table, I think the path forward for Democrats is fiscal responsibility. Which should be easy since all Trump is going to do is further balloon the deficit.
There's nothing more boring and lame than the guy who talks about fiscal responsibility. What a loser. The voters like the guy who makes blowjob jokes with the mic. That guy is funny
Every politician says we should be fiscally responsible, but few make it the center of their political identity. Obama certainly did not. Doing so is not any path forward it's a farce.
This is I think the synthesis between "policy positioning is important" and "voters don't care about policy. What mostly matters is how candidates frame and position themselves with issues voters already care about rather than the specific technocratic details of public policy. Polis being perceived as the guy who is trying to cut taxes is probably more important than actually cutting taxes. This actually sucks in some sense, since it means framing/positioning is more important than delivering outcomes.
Policy scholars might call this something resembling a Narrative Policy Framework approach to policymaking:
The NPF seeks to measure how narratives are used in policymaking. Narratives are stylized accounts of the origins, aims, and likely impacts of policies. They are used strategically to reinforce or oppose policy measures. Narratives have a setting, characters, plot, and moral. They can be compared to marketing, as persuasion based more on appealing to an audience’s beliefs than on the ‘facts’. People will pay attention to certain narratives because they are boundedly rational, seeking shortcuts to gather sufficient information, and prone to accept simple stories that confirm their biases, exploit their emotions, and/or come from a source they trust.
To make a point that Yglesias himself has made, if "nothing" matters then why did Trump say that he would not sign a national abortion ban? He loudly said he would be pro IVF. He also said he would protect Social Security. Now he may renege on all of those but those were his stated positions during the campaign. Do you think he would have still won if he had taken the opposite of those stances?
Yes. I think he would've won if he said that, and that immigrants were the lifeblood of the country and trans women should play in sports and Ukraine deserves all the support in the world. As long as he winked afterward and made blowjob jokes. Gun to my head I am completely serious that's what I think.
It is ironic that it is Trump's government that is trying to undo congestion pricing in NYC. But it is crazy that the federal government has any say whatsoever in whether NYC charges cars to drive on its streets. And this reinforces the idea that the whole bloated, lawyerly, corrupt system is due for some major trimming.
"But it also doesn’t really make sense to recruit candidates who are moderate on those issues if Democrats, as a party, are going to say that climate change will lead to human extinction or that all DEI critics are aiming to re-impose segregation" Shots fired at Jamelle Bouie.
I have to say, I think this is pretty unfair to Jamelle here. I'm with you that his rhetorical flourish at the end calling this Trump administration attack on DEI a new segregation is way too much. But that's partly because it detracts from the first 80% of the column; which as far as I can tell you pretty much agree with.
In his column he notes "To a certain set of well-meaning cultural liberals, D.E.I. refers mainly to H.R. mandates and ineffectual diversity training." He actually links to an article noting D.E.I trainings are pretty ineffective. He also notes that there is a lot of left wing critique that DEI is just theater companies do without actually doing anything to change the diversity at a company (a critique I'm pretty sure you share...I know I share).
And then probably the thesis of the entire column "But then we have to remember that D.E.I. also means something to people on the political right, from the reactionaries who lead the White House to the propagandists who carry their message to the masses. For them, D.E.I. is less “white fragility” and silly posters about “white supremacy culture” than it is the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position.".
Like again, I'm pretty sure you agree with this. He takes a swipe at "white fragility" indicating he's pretty with you that Tema Okun and Robin DeAngelo have some pretty dumb ideas they're putting out. And then he lays out all the ways the administration is going after diversity itself; like Pete Hesgeth declaring the end of recognizing Black History Month. And then he notes "Attorney General Pam Bondi has instructed the agency to target private-sector diversity programs for potential “criminal investigation.” Like Yikes! I think Jamelle is right to point out how gross this is. Even if you take a pretty dim view DEI trainings (and I do take dim view generally), the idea DOJ should be threatening private companies for having these trainings is asinine. Again, I'm pretty sure you agree with the specific points he's making here.
Matt I know you're gotten a lot of pretty unfair flack from people to your left. Especially people on the more environmental left. So I get the urge to punch a left a bit. But I think you might be taking it a bit too far here.
It’s interesting that you only see this from one side. Many companies didn’t want to do DEI in the first place but did because they felt had they had to as protection against legal action. It’s asinine what the left has done using government power to advance their politics. I’m hearing a lot of people on the left say now that they don’t really support DEI BUT….. then go into some rant about how anti-DEI is bad. I’m not buying it.
I don’t support organized religion in the abstract, and I find it disgusting that churches and individual clergy of all kinds have used their various legal protections and tax breaks as well a good dose of sanctimonious nonsense to get away with and cover up heinous crimes.
However, if an administration took power and promised to end those abuses by issuing a bunch of menacing Executive Orders and issuing memos about rooting out religious influence from every aspect of life, and also engaged in thinly veiled threats on the side (“we want clergy to not go to work because they’re traumatized”), I would oppose that. Two wrongs don’t make a right in this case.
The Trump administration‘s assault on DEI is top to bottom bad faith - if there’s a principled objection to DEI in there, it’s buried under bloodthirsty vindictiveness. They want people to suffer, and they’ve said so. And they are absolutely not going to stop at DEI: it’s either going to turn into a McCarthy-style witch hunt or they’ll get bored and find a new and probably adjacent target for their rage.
DEI is bad. It is the first hobby horse I got on in this space. Before Rufo, Before Matt found his voice on this, before the Right took it on and developed their cancel culture bullshit. I said the emperor was buck naked the first time I saw him shaking his bare ass.
So sure Trump is bad too. But he’s right on this. I support it. You either want it gone or you don’t.
I agree with this. Is there a Black person you know that has been fired for being a diversity hire? I’d be interested in learning about that circumstance. That would be bad - if true and not supported with other pertinent facts.
As I understand it, the Pam Bondi focus isn't on the training programs, but on DEI programs that work as discrimination against white people and asian people.
Bouie mentions favorably a program that would provide grants exclusively to Black women entrepreneurs while also saying that the administration's attack on DEI is about "reimposing hierarchies of race and gender onto American society." I think one can oppose the first without wanting the second. I read Bouie's essay as disagreeing with me.
The problem is of course she was deliberately vague in what she meant. Which I'm sure is the point so as to no run afoul of the inevitable court case if/when she does bring a suit.
But again context matters here. First, based on actions taken in other parts of the Trump administration, it's extraordinarily clear that actions taken go way way beyond dismantling the most cringe DEI training programs.
And unlike the first administration, Trump is surrounded by loyalists who want to do anything to kiss his butt. I think it's absolutely reasonable to assume Bondi, Hesgeth (and likely Patel) are acting in accordance with Trump's wishes and beliefs (or that they were chosen because they happen to align with Trump's view of the world which I think is part of the motivation for why someone completely unqualified like Hesgeth was picked as SecDef). And this is a man who blamed a plane crash in DC on "DEI"; an absolutely rancid and ludicrous statement. Just a perfect encapsulation of Bouie's point that "DEI" is being used as cudgel to go way beyond specific training programs (honestly surprised Bouie didn't bring up this example as it's the most obvious piece of evidence to me to support the part of his thesis that doesn't involve saying this is the new segregation; which again I agree with Matt this part of the column went too far in it's argument).
Also, Bondi is also the person who dropped an investigation into the shadiness of Trump university after getting a hefty donation.
I think what I'm getting at is while you're right to note that in a vacuum you can see Bondi's statement has at least a somewhat good faith attempt to root out possible actual discrimination against white employees. But in context, I think myself and Bouie have a lot of ground to say a more cynical interpretation is called for here. Proof is obviously in the pudding. Given there is some sign Trump's poll numbers are starting to drop, who knows how much pivoting is going to happen soon to a less radical agenda (especially with everything going on budget wise that Matt and Brian go into today on the podcast).
"for them, D.E.I. is less “white fragility” and silly posters about “white supremacy culture” than it is the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position."."
except of course this is flat out bullshit and wrong.
Democrats won the fight for "equality" Republicans bought into that. Then Democrats changed it from equality to equity.
Equity is just another name for affirmative action. It says that if you have X percent of the population, then you should have X percent of a job, or on a board. There's is STRONG disagreement against that position.
And it leads to nonsense like we need to put more white people in the NBA because of equity.
"except of course this is flat out bullshit and wrong"
I think the sense in which the statement "for them...it is the mere presence [of a non-white male]" is NOT bullshit can be seen more plainly when someone is labelled "a DEI" and then described as though their identity makes it self-evident they must be unqualified.
Like what happened with the pilot on the Black Hawk crash at DCA. "See, Trump was right all along - it turns out the pilot is a *woman*. No further details needed."
It's understandable that affirmative action makes people question whether someone truly earned their "spot", meaning there might have been a better candidate who was passed over. This objection is not about "mere presence", and it's not fair or useful to characterize it that way.
But a healthy subset of objectors to DEI, like Trump, do seem to slide quite easily into "mere presence" arguments at the first opportunity.
I always think I'm in the minority in this comment section that I seem to like takes from Matt Y and Jamelle Bouie on many things.
One diametrically opposed take from Jamelle that I think Matt and other centrist democrats should grapple with more is his criticism that the center left tends to believe "that public opinion cannot be shaped or mobilized or moved, only reacted to." I see echoes of this in today's MattY piece where he mentions the power of Trump the individual to change the party and how polarization is not a purely structural foregone conclusion. Yes Trump moderated on key issues, but he also is doing things that no Republican would agree with even a month ago (becoming pro-Kremlin) and yet they all fall in line and it BECOMES their opinion.
"but he also is doing things that no Republican would agree with even a month ago (becoming pro-Kremlin) and yet they all fall in line and it BECOMES their opinion."
I would think Matt's response would be that these are incredibly unpopular moves and will be a significant negative for Trump. Will some portion of the base adopt these opinions - yes. Just like some part of the Democratic base adopted "white fragility." But outside that base, broadcasting unpopular opinions makes you less popular as a politician.
So first, one of the reasons I admonished Matt a little bit is that him and Jamelle actually probably agree on like 80% of issues. In fact even within the Democratic coalition they probably agree more than disagree (Jamelle has written a lot about the problems of NIMBYism in his hometown of Charlottesville for example). So part of this was a call from me to say "Hey, no need to attack someone who's ultimately an ally".
Second, I think one of the striking things with Biden is how much he didn't seem to shape Democratic opinion on anything. As has now been noted at nauseum (not just here), more lefty staffers seemed to push Biden rather than other way around (just seems clear that Biden's real calling was probably to be senate majority leader where his sort of coalitional bridge building would be most effective). Reality is most presidents end effecting opinion of their party on a variety of measures. For example, Matt has brought up Obama's moderate position on gay marriage a number of times. There was a very noticeable poll bump among registered Democrats supporting gay marriage.
I should say this is one of the reasons that I have such a hard time with these political prognostications about voting coalitions in 2028. While I agree with Matt, Democratic party should allow more moderates to run for senate if they want to win. I think he's under estimating how much voting coalitions and how states vote can change faster than we think. Hispanic vote swung way to the right in a manner I think no one would have predicted in 2016 given how much of Trump's campaign was built around some pretty bigoted rhetoric around people from Central and South America. I went to school in Virginia and when I was in college, Virginia was not just a "red" state but a pretty solidly "red" state. And now it's basically the opposite (8-10% red when I was in college, 8-10% blue now).
Trying to figure out whatever issue is going to matter in the election four years later is often a mug's game. I mean the perfect example of what I'm talking about is the GOP autopsy right after the 2012 election. Like almost literally a version of Matt's argument about moderation but from a right of center angle, including moderating rhetoric and policy around immigration. So instead a candidate does the complete opposite in 2016...and wins. Now not saying the move is to swing far to the left on a particular issue is the move here (a mistake the left wing I think made when they saw Trump swung way to the right on immigration and won), but rather figuring out what issue is going to be the zeitgeist issue four years from now that changes voting coalitions is basically an impossibility.
Eh, I was unsure about that, but this bit pushed me into not objecting:
"To concede that this administration has a point about D.E.I., as some of Trump’s opponents have, is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law."
More importantly than holding the "Common Sense Democrats" positions imo is the ability to do so authentically and in plain English. When I think of authentic and plain English, the first politician I think of is AOC (even though I personally her policy positions are too far to the left).
Too many mainstream Democrats aren't able to be authentic and aren't able to speak to voters in a normal way. If the moderate lane can't do this, then I fear we will be stuck with AOC in 2028, and Matt's agenda will be for naught.
Fewer lawyers, people who have worked in nonprofits their whole careers, career politicians. More businesspeople and people who have worked normal jobs.
Like many people who have a history of donating to Democratic candidates, I get a lot of random text messages from people running for office. Yesterday I got one from someone who touted his biography as an "activist and substitute teacher." No offense against the guy -- he might be great, I know nothing about him -- but it really turned me off.
You’re gonna need to lose multiple elections to clean up the current mess. The current group is too far left. Until a real centrist group of dems comes forward, you have lost centrists like myself.
"Democrats should aim to be in a position to win Senate majorities without desperate gambits, to meaningfully contest state offices in all fifty states, and to make blue areas thriving magnets for people and capital requires a bigger program of party renewal."
Straight into my veins, Matt.
Democrats sometimes forget that "You play to win the game", as Herm Edwards said. The game is to win Senate and House seats (for Congress) and to win the Electoral College (for the Presidency). That's it. Pick positions that will win the game.
That means matching the cultural and policy priorities of lots of people in states that disagree with the cultural and policy positions of people in NYC, LA, SF, DC and BOS. Less focus on climate change, gun control and racial essentialism and more focus on government efficiency, equality of opportunity and immigration enforcement. Less hectoring, more encouraging.
Seconded. I particularly like how reframing the game around winning Senate seats rather than a narrow focus on the presidency crystallizes the necessity of a party that's heterogenous and small-L liberal. Deeply internalizing that Democrats will need to champion people who can win in West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Utah, and anywhere to the right of the median voter gives one a gut level understanding of how big the tent needs to be.
Of course, this will lead squabbling about what the core tenets of being a Democrat are, which I suppose we will claim are contained in the Commonsense Manifesto.
And for progressives who might be bummed out about that fact, their consolation should be that they actually were very effective at moving Democrats to the left! Now, there must be a natural reaction to the center.
And then, my bet is that there will be another big expansion of the welfare state triggered by AI job replacement. History is long and left policy will live to fight another day.
I doubt AI job replacement will lead to an expansion of the welfare state—at least in the early stages of this technology rollout—because it’s initially targeting workers in the upper middle class. These displaced workers could likely find some alternative employment that pays better than long-term welfare ever will.
For example, I imagine every knowledge worker could be a low-level manager overseeing minimum-wage workers at any such business because it mainly requires rule-following and enforcement. Even someone with substandard social skills can engage in the simple management directives needed in such roles. They may even take a passive-aggressive approach, primarily providing feedback over text/email or printing out yet another page of instructions to post in the workplace.
Yet I don’t think these formerly upper-middle-class workers (or aspirational ones if just at the beginning of their careers) will be satisfied with either unskilled supervision or welfare because of the status implications. There may be some Luddite attempts to limit AI proliferation to protect certain careers (e.g., local government employees or medical professions) as well as new make-work jobs, possibly in NGOs. Yet those will be far more expensive than traditional welfare and will likely be limited in their proliferation.
It could be a particularly turbulent time in terms of social, economic, and political strife. The most fitting analog may be the industrialization of agriculture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, the vast majority of people were employed in some form of farm labor on small family farms. Yet industrialization radically changed the economic structure such that only large corporate entities could survive, as it required significant fixed-cost investments to produce agricultural products with far less labor and far lower marginal costs. Not only did this crush small family farm profits, but they couldn’t even collect sufficient revenue to cover the annual fixed costs necessary to sustain themselves. And most of these farms had debt, possibly even mortgages on their land, which quickly ruined them as their incomes collapsed.
These workers and their families had to move to cities and seek employment in 1900s-era industrial factories. These were truly hell on earth. Just the visuals of open flames and dark, smoke-filled cavernous facilities met their conception of damnation. And they constantly risked gruesome injuries that could kill or cripple in novel ways—as they were reminded by personally witnessing such regular occurrences. Moreover, they were commonly working 60 to 80 hours a week for subsistence wages, even compared to their recent experience with the sparse living of independent family farms. Fortunately, subsequent technological, political, and social advances greatly improved the worker experience of industrial labor.
Hopefully, any future AI-fueled labor market disruptions aren’t as terrifying as that. At a minimum, we’re a far wealthier society. Yet there will be the novel social and political question of how to handle the rapid loss in status of previously upper-middle-class workers. Who knows how that will go.
Call me crazy, but I don't think that genuinely skilled knowledge-workers are going to very much being subjected to mass downward mobility where the predominant option is to go manage service workers. For one thing, management is actually a different skillset from most knowledge jobs.
Exactly, and while I’m a tech worker who did turn out to have the skill to move to management, I only do well because I manage skilled people. I don’t want to manage a group of unskilled people (developing a junior member of my overall skilled team is different than this) and there will be a revolt of the petit-bourgeois if so many lose income and status.
Yes, and on top of that, the service workers can totally tell when we've got some bigshot egghead who thinks they know how to (say) run a grocery store but doesn't even have calluses on their hands from breaking down pallets and mopping bathrooms. Instead of One Of Us, who rose up through the ranks like any other grunt, even if it was at some other retail company. It's just really hard to bridge that class gap. If such a person arrives at the position out of loss and bitter resentment, well, all the harder. And at least at my company, compensation for managers is dictated by the feedback of us frontline grunts, so they actually do need to put in the effort to be likeable rather than imperious.
And on top of that, I expect that once they start trying to routinely use AI to cut their knowledge-worker headcounts by, say, 90%, they're going to start finding out how bad AI sucks at a lot of things.
So it'll be yet another episode of Capital enshittifying products to deskill jobs to lay off workers to nobody else's benefit.
What do you think will happen in a world where AI is smarter than all white collar workers? When your skills are no longer special their value goes down.
"Fortunately, subsequent technological, political, and social advances greatly improved the worker experience of industrial labor."
There were a lot of very violent labor protests in the 1920s and 1930s. I'm not convinced there won't be violence again.
“AI will fully replace knowledge workers but not be able to manage low-level service workers” doesn’t really make sense unless you assume that it will never be deployed in systems that can observe and interact with the material world. For that matter, I’d also expect cost-effective knowledge worker-equivalent AI to solve robotics very quickly (if the problem is solvable in principal, throwing the equivalent of an arbitrary number of superhuman and instantaneously communicating scientists at it will probably have major effects).
You say “superhuman scientists”, but if ASI is genuinely possible, worker displacement should be the absolute least of our worries.
I broadly agree with you on this one. Unfortunately, even an AI agent that’s “only” smart human-level on individual tasks will be effectively superhuman (because they’ll be tireless, faster than us, not as easily distractable, not as bandwidth-constrained in communication, etc.)
I don’t think anyone should derive consolation from the fact that moving Democrats to the left made them so toxic that Americans ended up giving Trump a second term.
I know you meant consolation, but the constellation typo got me to pay attention.
To be fair, there would be plenty of room for progressives on a more local level, and they still influence Democratic policy. They just can’t dictate it in this context.
Did they?
It’s easy to superficially move people when it’s just a loyalty test.
And back to your and John's point, core tenets mean jack shit if they're not winnable tenets.
If, in the end, you have uncompromisable principles that you can't win an election on, then electoral politics isn't the place for you. Go form a campaign group, convince people of your principles, build up support, gather together those who agree with you. There's a reason Martin Luther King never ran for office: he knew he would lose and that, in losing, he'd set back Civil Rights.
"There's a reason Martin Luther King never ran for office...."
and it's pretty much the same reason that he cited Socrates as his model when sitting in the Birmingham jail. Moral absolutism and politics don't go well together.
"Be sure, men of Athens, that if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself. Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time."
Progressives already know and practice this with respect to animal rights, taking a pass on probably the world’s most egregious moral mistake.
They “just” need to make the connection to other moral errors they’ve set their sights on.
Animals have no rights and no moral weight, so there is no moral issue wrapped up in eating them except the working conditions of those who kill them for us.
A very good point. Remind me, were you the one who asked Matt Y in a previous mailbag how he reconciles eating meat with his moral standards and how to convince more people to become vegan?
And the big changes to civil rights occurred AFTER the majority of voters became convinced not before.
The kinds of Democrats who run for statewide office in Mississippi are hardly left-wingers.
The last two Democratic gubernatorial nominees, for instance, were anti-abortion. One of them was the incumbent attorney general, a former district attorney with all of the strong law enforcement ties you would expect. The other was a state Public Service Commissioner who had made a name for himself fighting against utility price increases. Both focused on middle-of-the-road issues like Medicaid expansion, supporting education, opposing corruption, etc. And, ultimately, both won the same 46-47 percent of the vote against the same very disliked Republican governor.
Mike Espy, a US agriculture secretary under Clinton who had previously served as a moderate Democratic congressman known for reaching out across racial lines, turned in a similar showing against one of our Republican senators in 2018 (in a special election) and 2020. As did the previous viable Democratic Senate candidate in 2008.
So I don't think the problem in Mississippi is that Democrats run candidates who take positions that you just can't take here or have biographies that are alien to the median Mississippi experience. And I think the story is the same in most red states--especially most Southern ones.
A much bigger issue, as I see it, is that the very slim odds of statewide success put a huge damper on recruiting and party-building. If you're an ambitious young pragmatist (especially in a white district), running as a Republican is just a much easier path to an influential future.
This is a huge impediment to our country cultivating political talent. On the one hand, it was ridiculous that the mayor of South Bend, IN was running for president, but on the other, it was the only real way for a Democrat to raise their profile since such a person is not getting elected statewide.
Relatedly, I rolled my eyes a little when I heard Buttigieg was going to live in Michigan. But I get it.
I don't understand why Buttigieg moving to Michigan is strange to people. His husband is from Traverse City, his in-laws are still there, and they have young children.
To be clear, it's not a huge deal to me. Even by the standards of carpetbagging, it's not in the same ballpark as Hillary moving to New York in 1999/2000. I like Buttigieg and can easily imagine supporting him in a future Democratic presidential primary.
South Bend is actually very close to Michigan
It's a good thought but here's my cold water about ability to actually achieve this. It has never been clear to me that the form of progressivism at issue has ever had much popular currency, even in those big coastal western and ACELA cities. What they do have is high concentrations of NGOs and educational institutions that are able to inject that sort of character into all of the Democratic Party affiliated institutions and organizations. They are politically safe and most people just aren't paying that much attention, though we have seen local rebellions when things get too out of control (various recalls and referendums on the west coast, Eric Adam's, etc.)
I think the nature of media and culture is that these ideas transmit out into the redder parts of the country, and even deep red states have blue enough enclaves producing people that follow those trends. Bottom line is I don't think it's enough to hope for heterodoxy. Someone is going to actually have to go into places in NY and DC and SF and BOS and wherever and throw out the Tema Okun obsessed, central planning and degrowth curious, people. They are entrenched and it will be very, very bitter.
As I've been saying since I came back, LBJ that shit. Burn the Groups to the ground, destroy the personal and professional lives of their senior staffers, offer the juniors a long road back to anything resembling important work or influence, send the survivors scurrying to create a Green Party that we can then hippy-punch to death and deliberately shun the 3-4 representatives that party manages to elect to the House.
The *only* way the electorate will believe we are not the party of stupid-ass, racial-caste, socialist-adjacent, degrowther leftism is if we loudly and virulently attack those morons at every turn, deliberately shoving that 2-3% of the electorate out the leftmost edge of the tent and into the cold to starve.
as one of the skeptical centrists whose votes dems need to win, i can attest to the truth of this. i gave dems the benefit of the doubt in 2018 and 2020, but won't be so eager to believe them again.
it's great to tell me what i want to hear to my face, but if you're lauding sanders, aoc and tlaib as soon as i'm out of sight, i'll reserve a very healthy skepticism about who you'll listen to post-election.
My BIGGEST beef with the Harris campaign is that it explicitly turned down multiple "Sister Souljah" moments to repudiate various toxic positions. UGH!
All said, the likely pain of the next four years not withstanding, Harris winning would have been WORSE for the "sane center"
Possibly, but giving Trump time to *fucking die already* might have made the overall pain to the country lower when the GOP inevitably won in '28.
I could deal with being in the wilderness if we're just talking normal GOP ass-backwards fiscal priorities and there being some effective deregulatory and compliance-simplification in there, but Trump's empowered people who can't even get the latter, traditional GOP strength, correct!
You know the DSA is a thing, right? You can hippie-punch them *right now*. They even lose elections half the time in the bluest of the blue neighborhoods in blue cities in blue states.
Or better yet, the PSL, who are actual fucking tankies.
I agree with you passionately on this point and yet we don’t really get along. That seems telling. I’ll freely admit I enjoy tearing down unworthy elites.
Don't need to like you or vice versa to agree on "let's punch the fucking hippies first."
Just look at the reaction to Rep Seth Moulton in Massachusetts when he said he didn't want "formerly male" athletes competing in sports against his daughters. A lot of howling, clutching of pearls, outrage, etc from Dems up there. Just made the party look bad that he couldn't speak frankly and like a normal person on a 70/30 issue without getting that reaction (including from Gov Maura Healey, who I had thought was a talented, savvy politician). Entrenched and very bitter indeed.
Except for maybe Healey, the protests against Moulton just made the "Witch City" protesters look nuts and made him look sane by comparison. If we want to successfully moderate in the public eye, we need to not freak out every time a Democrat being moderate draws backlash from the left.
According to the latest poll, it's an 80/20 issue.
Maybe, but I believe the environment in which this conflict will occur has changed substantially since 2020 for a multitude of reasons. Notably, all political actors are increasingly constrained by the time and attention of others—including activists, funders, politicians, influencers, and ultimately the voting public. Even the X/Bluesky divide alone has greatly weakened the impact of 2020-primary-era progressive reach.
Add to that the ever-growing podcast and newsletter ecosystem, and it’s not obvious they can reach a significant number of sympathetic eyes and ears—especially when they may get more distribution through references to their thoughts and actions from critical venues, including Slow Boring and a multitude of publishers that range from the NYT-produced Ezra Klein Show to personalities and politicians on Truth Social.
Yes, many have institutional power and secured, long-term funding through NGOs and universities. Yet will it matter if their message is, at best, used as a foil by individuals and institutions promoting an alternative policy proposal? I.e., the Japanese soldier fighting WWII until the 1970s analogy.
Maybe some of us would appreciate a long and vicious fight with these adversaries. Progressive operatives stuck in 2020 thinking may similarly find meaning in that. Yet hopefully, most of us can get that out of our system without taking three needless decades. Like, would US/Japan relationship have been impacted in any way if a few GI’s joined their former adversaries in prolonging the Pacific theater conflict due to their residual enthusiasm for combat?
I very much hope you are right. Nothing would make me happier than to be wrong about this.
The last vote I cast in Massachusetts, in 2023, was to help Benjamin Weber replace Kendra Lara, who I had previously refused to support because she was DSA-endorsed. This was in one of the bluest areas of one of the bluest cities in the country.
Yeah it's the goddamn NGO staffer pipeline.
I didn't follow this election because I lived in a neighboring city, but this sparked my curiosity, so I looked Kendra up: she seems to not be able to ever get her paperwork straight. Driving without a license, driving into a house, not able to file her address properly so may not live in the district. Was there any other interesting information about her?
Not to my knowledge. She really was just that lousy and initially got elected because she ran in a three- or four-way primary race backed by the DSA and their bunch. That was it.
Oh, I'm told she was responsive to labor concerns when serving.
"Less focus on climate change, gun control"
At least less (no, zero) focus on HIGH COST measures to reduce CO2 emissions, like zero "McKibbenism" opposition to fossil fuel production and transportation projects, because they go against fast growth just like NEPA does.
Gun control should be a part of the focus on reducing urban crime and disorder.
Gun control is only credible if you are willing to aggressively police young, often black men, and put them in prison for a very long time over possession of an illegal handgun. Are you ready to do that?
Yes! Im a liberal who actually believes in gun control! Because young black men are also the most common victims of gun crime. And most young black men aren’t committing gun crimes!
If you're willing to put in the legwork to arrest people often enough, you don't even need the gun control or the long prison terms, just a large enough investigative arm and judiciary to make the administration of justice semi-certain and somewhat prompt.
Yea maybe it's just going to law school in Baltimore but I have developed what I believe to be a healthy skepticism of the power of writing words in a state code somewhere. The place to start is no nonsense enforcement of whats already on the books.
To me instead of focusing on new and/or mostly symbolic laws the question is how do we get smarter. Every time anyone does a deep dive into how black and grey market guns end up on city streets the source ends up being a shockingly small number of totally irresponsible and/or criminal dealers in low regulation states. Nevertheless they operate for years and years and years without anyone doing anything about it. These places can be shut down under long established, not particularly controversial, or constitutionally suspect laws. That has always struck me as a much more viable supply side strategy than, I dunno, parading out David Hogg again.
But also shockingly lax handling of guns by legal gun owners plays a part. I have a relative who until recently was an Assistant District Attorney in a place with loose gun laws. The number of cases she prosecuted that involved legally owned guns stolen from an unlocked car was shocking to me.
I find this similar to drug enforcement advocates who focus on “just a few” major gangs or cartels dominating various parts of the narcotics supply chain. Should we disrupt one, we’ll quickly find others—possibly even new entrants—filling the gap.
We could even imagine an increasingly decentralized supply chain where individuals with a clean-enough criminal record take the risk of laundering firearms from legal dealers to unknown individuals they meet through the internet. Would any state be open to imprisoning first-time offenders for such a crime? If not, many people may take the risk for a quick profit.
Similar to drugs, the core problem with illegal firearm possession is demand. In both cases, harsh punishment could reduce that demand, possibly by incarcerating individuals such that they’re unable to purchase either. Yet that is expensive and laborious, and many people find long-term lockups for simple possession of firearms unsavory—even for felons previously convicted of violent crime.
I hear what you're saying and it's a good point.
I also think though that the lawful manufacture and sale of guns affords a traceability that doesn't exist with narcotics. So yes, there is a point of diminishing returns but it's an imperfect parallel. As I understand it a significant portion of the guns on the streets of Baltimore 20 years ago were being traced to two or three ultra lax FFLs in the state. Now they're traced to a handful of FFLs down south. IIRC there was an article some years ago where they identified a particular shop where a guy with felonies was coming in very regularly, selecting the items for his 'girlfriend' to purchase, then transporting them up the highway.
I'm not saying we're ever going to prevent all gun crime. I'm just saying I don't see why we need to tolerate that kind of crap and in my experience the vast, vast majority of sellers do not operate in such a way. And I'm a gun owner! All it does is make my life harder.
Probably hard to do the swift and certain thing for something that requires a pretext stop. But I’m all about improving the swiftness and certainty of the justice system!
I mean that you don't even really need to focus on gun possession if their use results in sure and certain consequences.
I think if we made apprehension and prosecution for possession of an illegal hand gun much more certain (I hope that is what you mean by "aggressive"), it would not be necessary to have long sentences. Long sentences cost a lot more and withdraw more person-days from the labor force than shorter sentences.
There is a certainly a cost effectiveness analysis to be done but it's important to be realistic about this. The experience over the last few years in DC suggests that perfunctory arrests or very short sentences are not a deterrent and putting people right back out results in nothing but that person re-offending. There is no free lunch on this and if we are going to say we care about this we have to be willing to spend money on people doing years behind bars over illegal possession alone, not weeks or months.
I agree on the free lunch. More certain arrest and prosecution requires resources. But a series of short sentences adds up.
The entire concept of an "illegal" handgun is such a stolen base. A huge part of the problem is that dems don't have a credible definition of what an "illegal" handgun is. Which is why we get stuff like this: https://crimeresearch.org/2023/07/maryland-shall-issues-map-of-montgomery-county-maryland-exclusionary-zones/
"Guns aren't illegal, people are illegal!" Oh, wait....
Unironically yes. Prohibited possessors are a thing. "Illegal guns" are not.
Yea I agree what they tried to do with that was ridiculous (it was held unconstitutional) but I don't think its unclear what an 'illegal' handgun is. It's a handgun in the possession of a prohibited person (NFA) or person who obtained it as a result of a straw sale. I guess in a way we're talking more about the individual than the object but that's a pretty pedantic complaint.
The notion that we should aggressively prosecute (violent)felon in possession laws seems obvious to me. Places that fail to do so are pretty baffling given that I don't even really think of that as being within the scope of "gun control". "Gun Control" is about what you can buy and where you can carry it and what paperwork you do or don't have to fill out, as a lawful citizen.
Once you're an adjudicated prohibited possessor you're kinda beyond the scope of gun control enforcement, you're just subject to normal criminal penalties.
Most of us don't care if our gun control is "credible." We just want to make our cities safer. This only requires reducing illegal guns on the streets regardless of the color of the hands carrying them and enforcing reasonable penalties.
Well, if there comes a time when gun control is not cost effective, then we can scale back enforcement.
There are much bigger problems with the credibility of gun control than enforcement when an "illegal" handgun is determined by a map like the one here: https://crimeresearch.org/2023/07/maryland-shall-issues-map-of-montgomery-county-maryland-exclusionary-zones/
Yes.
Fair enough!
Those young men's fathers and mothers will probably cheer for them to be thrown in jail.
Let's just ditch the words "gun control" and use the regular person words for this: "reducing crime". If you have to mention guns then it's something like "taking illegal guns from criminals" or "getting illegal guns off the streets" or whatnot. Dems Talk Like A Normal Person challenge.
Exactly. The reason to make guns tracible is to get them out of the hands of criminals.
The reason to properly fund, train, and operate law enforcement agencies is to get criminals with guns into prison. Making guns traceable is a bad idea.
Guns are already traceable - they have serial numbers.
I’d rather get criminals without guns in prison. The gun it the hand of that murderous thug did not get there from the manufacturer by telekinesis.
“I’d rather get criminals without guns in prison”
So you don’t want to arrest and prosecute the people who are illegally providing guns to, for instance, gang members?
"We're going to convince the people concerned with crime that what they really want is gun control" is a core dem delusion that needs to be be aggressively stomped out of existence if they're going to be competitive in the Senate. The various Bloomberg funded orgs are high on the list of "the groups" undermining the party's viability.
As I said, it's just one aspect of policing and prosecution of crime.
If they could develop a coherent statutory framework that might be the case. As it is, their framework is "ban anything we can get away with." Enhanced enforcement of the current status quo shit show actively harms their credibility.
I do not think the IS any coherent strategy for trying to restrict the supply of fossil fuels. All efforts should be on cost effective ways to reduce demand and encourage CCS.
I do actually think this part of the motivation behind the "Abundance Agenda" from Derick Thompson and Ezra Klein. Not just a good plan on the merits as far as encouraging economic growth, but a plan that could in theory peel off say 5% of Trump voters.
Was not the Obama - Plouffe strategy in 2008 to 'compete in all 50 states' and did Obama not win in INDIANA?
Obama won Iowa by 10 points. I'll never not be just stunned by that performance.
If Trump collapses the economy enough, the Democrats could win Iowa by 10 points again in 2028.
And then they'll lose the 2030 midterms by 20 points when the economy doesn't magically bounce back within 2 years because voters have the patience of a toddler!
We probably won’t see huge swings, but we’ll see small swings in votes and huge swings in power until one of the two parties figures out how to attract a large majority.
Yup. To continue the football analogy, if you consider yourself to be a running team but are playing a team with a good run defense, you may need to become a passing team that day or change your blocking scheme. Doesn’t make you any less of a running team…but you get no points for running the ball 40 times but losing the game vs. running it 20 times and winning.
It will also be helpful if the candidates actually believe in the new messages.
At first glance winning Senate majorities with a 50 state strategy seems at odds with the idea of making blue areas thriving magnets. After all, it would be good if like a quarter of Seattle’s population moved to Wyoming to carpetbag and elect a Democrat.
But they aren’t, because the marginal person leaving a blue area due to bad governance is a disaffected conservative. Maybe not full on MAGA, but it’s almost always someone in the Republican tent. So while you occasionally hear people in Texas or Nashville bitch about California people driving up home prices and making traffic worse, what influx there is makes Senate polarization worse rather than better. People who vote blue, even if they’re upset with poor urban governance, are usually willing to tough it out because everything else is so much better.
I am sympathetic to the argument that culturally-amorphous, rurally-inflected, borderline pro-gun 2016 Sanders has a role to play in some places.
I am unsympathetic to the argument that anything he's done or anyone who spun off from his orbit since then has any merit whatsoever.
I think a big problem with shifting left economically is that it doesn’t address what working class people actually want, and I think we can all agree that we need to win more of their votes.
You can ask working class people in NYC what their concerns are and they’ll tell you. Number one for them (like it is for everyone who lives here) is housing costs. Neoliberalism and big bad billionaires didn’t cause that - restrictive zoning did. You’re not going to fix that problem by attacking neoliberalism (whatever that means) or taxing billionaires more.
Another issue that working class people will cite is violent crime - again - this isn’t about billionaires - they aren’t going up to the Bronx and raping and murdering (billionaires do rape occasionally but prefer to do so on their yachts to vulnerable employees). Yet another issue is being able to ride the subway without having to worry about a crazy person pushing you on the tracks or being erratic in the train - these are not “neoliberal” issues - and they won’t be solved by taxing billionaires more or even executing them. The list goes on and on - they want good schools for their kids - and despite having some of the highest per-pupil spending in the country, NYC schools are not performing very well. Are you really going to tell me that taxing billionaires more and further increasing that spending another 10-20% will turn that around?
Again, I’m not opposed to trying to re-balance the economy to being less friendly to capital (we should definitely remove the carried-interest deduction) and more friendly to workers - but if you want the votes of the working class then I think you need to actually listen to them and respond to what they want.
OK, so I actually agree with you on all these concerns! I want affordable housing and less crime and clean, safe streets where mentally ill homeless people aren't peeing on the sidewalk and yelling at passerby! These are all good ideas!
The problem is, here we're discussing how to win federal elections (POTUS, US Senate). And the federal government just doesn't have a lot to do with local housing construction and law enforcement.
Forgive me for putting my elitist hat on, but this is why, for democracy to work, people have to have some basic understanding of our system of government! If people vote for a Republican President because they're pissed off at their mayor/city council, then that makes our job hella harder.
I know Matt Y has spoken about Democrats needing to focus on good governance in blue cities, and he's 100% right, but in the meantime, what does the working class want that THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT can provide?
Also! You mention housing costs as a big concern, and rightly so. The problem is, there are actually two constituencies here, with opposing goals: people who want to buy a house want cheaper housing, but people who *currently own a house* want their house to appreciate in value, i.e., want more expensive housing. Moreover, even people who are ok with building more housing in the abstract are not ok with building it next door to them (NIMBY is a thing for a reason). That doesn't mean give up on affordable housing, but it does mean that solving the housing problem isn't "super easy, barely an inconvenience!"
Having politicians talk a big game about solving problems is a good way to win elections, even if they have no power to solve the problems.
Talk about violent crime a lot, pretend to care, do some dumb performative stuff on TV, etc. Trump excels at this (and literally nothing else) and we can learn from him.
> Having politicians talk a big game about solving problems is a good way to win elections, even if they have no power to solve the problems.
Yes, but then you're screwed when the next election comes around and you've accomplished exactly none of the things you promised.
I think a decent chunk of the drop-off in Democratic turnout in 2024 can actually be attributed to this precise problem - if Biden's idiot campaign staff hadn't spent 2020 promising the moon, people wouldn't have had such unrealistic expectations.
Obviously you can't promise nothing, but sticking to more realistic low-key stuff is I think a healthier long-term plan.
(Of course if you don't care about the long-term, like Trump, then going wild does make a lot of sense)
The most frustrating part in some ways is early Biden Admin knew this extremely well with Covid Vaccinations. They very deftly made broad public proclamations of a goal target for vaccinations, and then absolutely smashed those numbers and announced that they had smashed their numbers. Wash rinse repeat. There were even a few articles form annoyed public health workers saying they were lowballing for politics. But they kept doing it and it was the period of his highest popularity! Totally undercut by trying to be FDR later and instead moving Carter up in presidential rankings.
I think this particular strength of Biden’s became a liability when the Delta and Omicron variants reared their ugly heads
"Let's lower ourselves to the level of the bullshit artist who talks big about solving problems but in reality either doesn't solve them or makes them worse" is a way to win elections, but not one I can support without losing my soul.
Episode 492,358 in an ongoing series: Professional-class knowledge workers find the mechanics of politics distasteful and keep trying to get the politicians who represent them to act like soulless automatons, and it doesn't work.
I don't mean to single you out, but if you remember our discussion the other week about professional-class progressives throwing a shitfit in Philly over Parker, one of their major lines of "attack" is that she puts her name and face on shit and talks about all the things "her" city government is doing, and they think it's crass and tasteless. What it is, is the very essence of how democratic politics is supposed to work.
This is a weird and unproductive hang-up to have. No one is asking you to make shit worse, just let the politicians talk about problems at every level and put pressure on their own party's local and state electeds to fix shit at every level, then loudly take credit for successes at every level.
I guess I'm expressing myself really badly, because we're talking past each other.
I never, ever said I want politicians to act like soulless automatons. Passion in a good cause is a good thing! Obama was passionate!
In my previous comment, I wasn't objecting to your mayor talking up her successes and demanding solutions. Good for her! I was objecting to "let's learn from Trump, who lies every single time he opens his goddamn mouth."
Example time:
Good: Mayor of Philly saying, "During my term as mayor, crime fell by n% thanks to xyz actions I took! Reelect me, and I will work to make it fall further AND I will get the homeless off the streets!"
Bad: Mayor of Philly saying, "Reelect me and every child in Philly will receive a magic sparking unicorn pony! And we'll make Pittsburgh pay for it"
See the difference?
But that's not what you said above, at all.
Separation of powers amongst jurisdictions is fine for policymaking but just doesn't matter at all for politics, and we need to get over that instead of, as you did above, complaining about it.
I mean, nobody is under any obligation to copy Trump’s brain-dead approach to actual policy making. This is just a question of media strategy
I think it's quite clear that local blue city and state governance reflects quite strongly on the national brand.
If people see news stories about blue city disorder, they punish the national blue politicians.
When people see stories about crazy DEI stuff (especially in public schools), or antisemitism on campus, they punish the national democratic party
Democrats are supposed to be the party of making government work for you to solve problems. But in the bluest areas where they have complete control they have been REALLY failing.
You do have a good point on the NYMBY issue. The solution of course is actually reaching out to those evil big businesses and developers to push it through. That way you cross party buyin.
San Francisco was the textbook case of it.
YIMBYism strikes me as similar to nuclear power: it requires a certain ability to prioritize thought over emotions, and thus its supporters seem to mostly be technocrat types. YIMBYism is fairly disruptive, so supporters also have to be OK with that. This is inherently a pretty small group.
"The Federal government doesn't have a lot to do with zoning laws"
Maybe it should. It does in Japan and they enforce uniform standards and property rights nationwide.
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html?m=1
I'd be open to discussing the pros and cons, but I have a feeling that it would be hideously unpopular in the US, and with good reason.
Now that we have a vindictive POS as POTUS, would I trust the federal government to take good care of zoning? Heck no! I picture Trump and Musk saying to each other, "How else can we make libs cry?" "I know, let's stick Boston and NYC with completely stupid zoning regulations!"
Welcome to the team.
Now extend that to everything the State does....
My comment was a bit tongue in cheek, I agree it would be unpopular. But something legitimately worth considering at the state level.
I've never understood why Leftists don't frame housing costs and restrictive zoning as a part of neoliberalism, except that they're all homeowners. Because it *absolutely is*! Restrictive zoning is part of the glue that keeps the deflationary coalition together, maintaining political support for the neoliberal order: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/deflation-inflation/
I just think that today's self-declared "Neoliberals" find themselves in fights with self-declared Leftists on city councils about housing, and project that back into the past rather than admitting that their own coalition (the suburban, highly-educated professionals of the Democratic Party) was essential in passing NIMBY policies. The Leftists are happy to polarize this way because it also exonerates *them* for supporting NIMBY policies.
Are you TRYING to set Mr. YIIMBY himself off :-)
I think one thing this misses is the popular assessment of Obama. Matt correctly sees Obama and the Obama governing agenda as essentially moderate, but most liberals, outside of a few think-tanks that Matt interacts with much more than the general public do, still think of Obama the man as the image they developed of him during the 2008 primary, a pretty radical left-winger who was, however, constrained by the realities of politics into a more moderate agenda than he would have personally preferred.
They saw him mouth the words of preferring civil unions to marriage equality and eventually see Biden drag him into aligning his public position with the private one they all believed he already had and think that applied to him much more broadly than it actually did/does.
And I think this shows in large part why the left was so much more prepared to accept moderation from Obama than from Biden. When they heard Obama make moderate statements they believed they were a political judgement. They thought that Obama didn't actually believe his moderation, but was saying and doing moderate things because they were the maximum he could actually get done. They fear from Biden or Harris that they are saying and doing moderate things because they actually believe in them. The complaint will be not that Obama was unable to deliver a public option or medicare for all, but that Biden or Harris doesn't really want to do that; they just want to maintain the corporate insurance-based medical system. And the same on other issues.
This, by the way, is why during the 2018 campaign, there wasn't a leftist revolt against Kyrsten Sinema, who was running a very moderate campaign on the issues. Because she's a bisexual former Green, they just assumed that her moderation was insincere. That's also why she provoked so much revulsion later on: they thought she was a disguised leftist lying to the moderates, so when she turned out to be a sincere convert to moderation, that felt like a betrayal, as if she had lied to them that she was really with them (which, of course, she had never actually done).
But this is what the left wants from a moderate: a moderate whose moderation is entirely strategic and insincere, and that means enough background in the left that they can believe (truthfully or not) that they are, in fact, a leftist who is faking moderation in order to deliver the leftest agenda that is politically possible.
Yes, this is fundamentally about tribalism and identity. It’s actually less about what you accomplish and more about what side you are on. Certain identities are assumed to be positive and others negative.
If it's about identity groups, it's interesting that Obama, as a mixed-race black/white man, was given more leeway to be moderate (by the left) than Harris, a mixed-race black/South Asian woman who campaigned in the 2020 primary on positions well to the left of Obama. Meanwhile, actual moderates found Obama's moderation more credible than Harris's.
I see it as a sign that the left wing of the Democratic Party was just far more radicalized in 2020 and '24 than they were in '08. But also, like Oliver's comment below, it was a shift "far more in the direction of weirdness than sincere leftwingness" -- staking out increasingly extreme and unusual rhetorical positions, rather than commitment to achievable left-aligned policy goals and a pragmatic plan to achieve them.
Look at the backgrounds, though: Obama was a community organizer and a law professor and a State Senator before he ran for the US Senate. Harris was DA for SF and then AG of CA.
One of those is a background where you'd expect a deep-rooted sincere leftist pretending to be moderate: the other is the background of a sincere moderate pretending (in 2020) to be more left than she actually was.
Makes sense -- although, by 2024, being a prosecutor from SF no longer seemed to the median American like a credible signal of genuine moderation. Anywhere else would have ben better, or any election cycle where there wasn't recent news about California prosecutors' choice to permit shoplifting.
Kamala the Cop might have polled better. Her discussion about owning a gun was an interesting political moment.
Great point, she was a normal prosecutor, but the contemporary image of an SF prosecutor is still Chesa Boudin for most people. I wonder if it would have helped for her to endorse the recall of Boudin. It would have drawn criticism, but would have been a strong signal. A more likely opportunity was to endorse Prop. 36 in 2024. It still blows my mind that she didn't do that.
True enough: though, of course, to leftists the fact that she did prosecute shoplifters was a problem.
The identity groups do matter, but also being a skilled communicator matters. Obama is a generational communicator; Kamala is... not.
Yeah, I think the changes to the Left between 2008 and 2024 make a bigger difference than specific differences between Obama '08 and Harris '24. The Sanders losses in 2016 and 2020 fed a grievance identity and an adverse relationship with the party between the Left and mainstream Democrats.
The biggest reason Sinema didn't draw as much attention in 2018 was the fact that that race just also had low cultural salience among the people who were obsessed with AOC that cycle.
Harris is a former law enforcement professional with a 2009 book entitled “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer”. The left would more easily trust JD Vance as their future standard bearer.
It's always interesting what things are political shibboleths and which aren't and when and how they change. It will be very interesting to see how attitudes toward what is critical to being left-wing or progressive change on specific issues: criminal justice reform, taxes, health insurance, Gaza, Russia, China, etc.
I think people wanted Obama as a remedy. I was eager to vote for a black man, for instance, because I thought it was an important step forward for the country. And he did run a pretty damn good campaign in my memory at least.
The way I would put it is that it's about trust. If Obama says "this is the most I could get", then leftists will largely believe him. If Biden says the same, then a lot of leftists will think he could have gotten a better (ie more left) deal but left that on the table because he didn't personally support it.
Yes, this is exactly it! Remember those bumper stickers about Obama in '08, "Time to get disappointed with someone new!" Obama started out with a lot of trust. I still don't completely understand it.
I mean that’s really the whole deal with representative government. It’s not like I get intelligence briefings or have economic advisors or what have you. So I try to elect someone who I think shares my values that I have reason to think would respond to the unexpected like my best self would, like Obama.
It turns out this is really imperfect. Like Obama had great morals and political instincts but not the best foreign policy instincts, etc. But he at least approached situations from what I believe to be the right standpoint.
As someone who worked on Sinema’s campaign in 2018, I can say that yes everyone thought she was a leftist underneath, and now with the benefit of Yglesias thought, my disappointment in her is actually more about her not appearing to have any discernible strategy or goals at all!
Don’t Obama’s successes with moderates and cross-pressured voters suggest he was actually perceived as moderate? If people saw him as a lefty faking moderation then real moderates would’ve been much more skeptical of him.
Yes.
This was the contradictory appeal of Obama: he appeared to be faking moderation to lefties and to be a genuine moderate to moderates.
pack it up boys we cracked the case, we just need to find another one of these people (only mostly kidding)
I don't disagree. AOC is the one of the only dems my mom and my sister both like. My mom is an old school party line dem who owns a Mayor Pete t-shirt and my sister dislikes the democratic party and is suspicious of most democrats because she feels they are inauthentic/too corporate/too pro Israel. Both of them will of course vote for just about any dem nominee but with varying degrees of nose plugging. I think the question is how this kind of thinking about AOC can translate away from sure dem votes and into people who actually need convincing.
Another interesting character is Fetterman. He has such a strange grab bag of positions and his middle east politics are such a turn off to young progressives I think many of them might actually withhold a vote from him and instead let a generic R gain voteshare. But he certainly has the 'heterodox policies and not afraid to dunk on leftists' market cornered.
I think the strikingly successful campaign for gay marriage has misled progressives for the last decade. Gay marriage has to be one of the fastest changing yet sticky issues of the modern rights movement, and it convinced activists that they could bowl over all opposition and eventually their policies would both be popular and hard to dislodge.
First, it was pretty much all or nothing (you could have a compromise civil union, but once you’ve let gay people get basically married it proved relatively easy to allow them to get actually married), it appealed to enlightened centrism (let gay people lead normal family lives) (this us why some gay people objected), and once in place it was clear the only people negatively affected were people with moral objections, which most Americans didn’t think warranted banning the whole thing.
We are still ironing out the edges of public accommodation vs conscience rights but otherwise it has been an amazing success.
However, a lot of progressive priorities, like trans access to single-sex spaces and race-conscious programs, are more like immigration and abortion, which are perennial issues of compromise and shifting centers.
First, there are various compromises that are stable in themselves or at least don’t tend to flip all the way to one side. No modern country has fully opened borders, and most have some limits on abortion. There’s some compromise possible between “Sarah McBride has to use the men’s bathroom” and “it’s legally required to let someone with a dick use your female-only spa” (which is the current policy if Washington state: https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-washington-spa-fights-antidiscrimination-laws-at-ninth-circuit/)
Second, there are people who are hurt by the progressive policy who are more sympathetic to a mass audience than the people who believed allowing gay marriage hurt their own marriage. Immigration can and does overwhelm communities, abortion ends something that could have become a child, there’s all the women who won’t use a spa if they are required to experience what we used to call indecent exposure. Some people will decide some or all of these are acceptable losses, but you won’t get the mass, stable shift like you saw in gay marriage because not everyone will agree.
Most causes are not gay marriage, and treating them like it has been a disaster for progressivism.
This also is more or less Matt's justification for his pro Bernie take in 2020. he would ultimatley be a moderate president but given more leash from the left. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/7/21002895/bernie-sanders-2020-electability
Very true, but with an interesting twist: coming up through the Left is a decades-old, traditional path to middle-of-the-road Democratic politics, which Leftists nonetheless keep insisting they despise even as they reenact it.
Was Krysten Sinema a "moderate"? Dying on the hill of protecting the carried interest loophole is not quite my definition of "moderation."
She was an iconoclast, I'll give her that.
I honestly don’t know what her deep personal political positions were. Her politics made no sense in terms of any objective (not in terms of “getting gratitude from rich people”, not in terms of a coherent leftist or centrist political approach, not in terms of getting re-elected).
Frankly, I think she was just a bad political strategist who was flailing around.
From what I can tell, her most consistent trait in Congress was really enjoying the activities of the wealthy (fashion, the weird winery internship, performative fitness)
Liberals tolerated Obama’s pandering because they got off on having a black President.
While the shift amongst Democrats since 2016 has been leftward it is far more in the direction of weirdness than sincere leftwingness. Central planning gets houses and nuclear power while the left drift among Democrats is philosophically opposed to top down organisation and overruling any group of stakeholders. There seem to be a philosophy that any kind of compromise is bad that leads to attacks on moderates, no discussion of necessary tradeoffs and makes obstructing imperfect policies the default.
Some Democrat infrastructure involves odd and insincere people: prison abolitionists, degrowthers, land acknowledgers, who don't seem to have any point or link to left wing politics other than to drive people to the GOP and the Dems do a lot of damage by not driving them out.
Zahran Mandani, the DSA mayoral candidate in New York, is running a campaign very focused on lowering prices. That's it. Now, I think when pressed on issues like defund the police, land acknolwedgements, etc. he's obviously pro, but he is centralizing very material issues in a typical leftist way.
Obviously, he'd be a terrible choice for NY mayor and would probably bankrupt the city, but he's stirring enthusiasm because he is breaking from some parts of the hard left.
How does he and others in that position square that circle?
If someone on the campaign trail asks him if sex criminals or people with illegal guns should be in prison what does he say? Or does he never meet people who might ask that fairly obvious question?
I once asked a prison abolitionist and he got angry and explained a policy that sounded exactly like prison as an alternative.
I usually hear some very long, winding rant that culminates in "lynch mobs, but leftishly."
"Lynch mobs, but in community."
"Lynch mobs, but reparatively."
"Lynch mobs, but abolitionistly."
"Lynch mobs, but intersectionally."
I've got a million of these.
A lot of these people get their power from moderate Democrats taking a "go along to get along" approach to online weirdness. What constituency do land acknowledgers really have? Who would miss them when they're gone?
Harvard University?
None, not even Native Americans. I hadn’t seen one since the DNC, until going to see the symphony a couple of weeks ago. It’s a pointless exercise, but I guess maybe it helps some of the mostly privileged people attending the symphony feel good about themselves.
The first time I saw one, it was on a PBS video on paleontology. I originally guessed that it meant that the discoveries were made in either the 18th or 19th century specifically with certain Native American groups were being forced off of their land. When I realized what it actually meant, it was second-hand embarrassing.
I'd like to see Matt write a "mainstream Democrats are good" series. The crux of the left's critique isn't about winning Ohio, it's that Democrats are proven failures. Their narrative is that all moderation achieves is surrendering in advance on policy in service of electoral outcomes no better than a coin toss.
In the real world, Obama was a two-term president who permanently expanded the welfare state, oversaw progress on social justice, and raised taxes. Clinton was the same. Biden involved Bernie and Warren to an unprecedented extent and we all know how that ended. But a lot of these folks don't seem to know that, and if you lose that debate, it's hard to persuade them of anything else.
Now, maybe they don't know because they don't want to know. They prefer to live in a comforting fantasy where bad things happen because "neoliberals" are traitors and if "good people" just took over the Democratic Party all would be well. People like that are beyond persuasion. But I think most folks aren't like that, they just want to win, and they need to be explained why Biden and Hillary don't show that mainstream Democrats are failures.
I think it is important to remember a lot of them are just odd people who object to compromise and think that failing to press the magic "solve all problems button" is because moderate Dems are evil and corrupt.
It's a sad sad worldview. "Everything I think is right, and the reason why it hasn't been implemented is because everyone else is evil and corrupt."
Man, I try to stay out of this stuff, but I read some moderate version of this statement in these comments every day. "Everything I think is moderate and common sense, and correct, and isn't implemented because those kids on the left are stupid and illogical."
Agreed! Doesn’t make it right when mods say it either
I definitely don't think it's just the kids who are stupid and illogical. Bernie is 83.
Bernie is a genuine leftist, he isn't a utopian socialist afraid of trade offs.
Matt wrote: "So unlike the needless post-Obama ideological pivot, Democrats now actually do need a pivot. A pivot away from the fuzzy semi-embrace of central planning and modern monetary theory ...". Bernie’s 2016 economic advisor was Kelton. I'm just reading that as shots fired by Matt at Bernie and I fully agree.
Even having involved the Warrenites heavily and embraced "social justice" enough to lose 2024, Biden passed some useful technocratic policy tweaks, improved nutrition support for the poor, expanded healthcare access for the middle class, improved the functioning of the IRS and Medicare, and invested in domestic manufacturing and energy.
Of course, because he gave the rest of the administration over to the Warrenites and the illiberal racialist left, we lost in 2024 and many or most of those gains will be rolled back, and then some.
Did Bill Clinton permanently expand the welfare state? I was too young to understand politics when he was president, but I thought he was known for working with the new Republican majority in the House to reduce and restructure public aid and "end welfare as we know it." He also reduced expenditures in economic boom times, and ended his presidency with a rare government budget surplus.
For sure any (two-term) President's record is broader than the sentence I gave it above. I was referring to Children's Health Insurance Program. Biden does not have a comparable achievement AFAIK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Health_Insurance_Program
The SNAP benefits expansion was probably as big an impact.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/us/politics/biden-food-stamps.html
Was SNAP expansion designed to be permanent? Many programs are enacted with an expiration date, and I think this was one of them.
I think the Democratic brand is in a dangerous spot w/r/t the daily DOGE news, and risks stepping on the rake and their 2026 campaign message.
The news making it to the low-info swing voter is "richest guy on the planet who has made cool stuff is firing a bunch of bureaucrats who work on stuff that doesn't matter to me, and finding a bunch of waste. He's pretty smart and has made cool stuff, so that's probably a good idea".
The current counterarguments on offer:
1) every agency you've never heard of is really important because reasons
2) its so unfair that bureaucrats are getting fired (only liberals/the left seem to care about this)
3) He's breaking the law (only liberals/the left seem to care about this)
4) He's taking power that belongs to Congress (only liberals/the left seem to care about this)
It seems to me that a better argument from a 2026 or 2028 hopeful is "drug-addled Elon is letting his concubines break a bunch of shit so he and Trump can steal from you without getting caught. Here are some examples of how the broken shit is affecting people like you, and how they are stealing." This argument is best made by a person with a high-level private sector background (a CEO/executive). None of the idpol stuff matters. The small-bore micro legislation you want to champion doesn't matter.
"drug-addled Elon is letting his concubines break a bunch of shit so he and Trump can steal from you without getting caught. Here are some examples of how the broken shit is affecting people like you, and how they are stealing."
Love it! Slap that in an ad!
I think "Elom has your tax filings now" might be a worthwhile line of argument (I don't even care if it's strictly true, although I think it is).
Those ads should be running *now.* Can’t understand why people aren’t freaking out about this
It'll come down to whether Trump/Elons tactics cause problems people can feel or not. I think they will, and that'll be the opportunity for Dems. If they don't, well...I'll change my mind on how wrong Trump and Elon are*.
*Though not about a. problems it causes for non-voters - I think the callousness toward, say, African children with HIV is grotesque, and; b. problems that aren't felt for 4+ years, like destroying our anti-China alliances.
Mostly agree, although much of the theft/graft would be invisible and only seen if pointed out.
An argument I actually keep seeing is
1b) That agency you claim you've never heard of runs IMPORTANT THING in your state and country which creates THIS MANY jobs for your community and if THEY ALL GET LAID OFF it's gonna really suck FOR YOU.
The lack of normie backlash to DOGE really makes me think Matt’s ideas of relocating government offices to different locales that aren’t DC is fundamentally a good idea. It’s easier to wish ill on people that aren’t people to you, it’s harder to support the layoff of your neighbor.
Unless you have some information about Musk's personal relationship with members of the DOGE team that's been overlooked by the rest of the media, I'm pretty sure "concubines" isn't the word you're looking for there . . . .
It wouldn’t bother me to make him deny it, but “fanboys”, “minions”, whatever.
Maybe people could just start asking why all his children were conceived using IVF? Just asking questions!
At least for me, the most damning aspect is the completely haphazard nature of it all. I'd at least hear them out if there was a coherent strategy behind it. But who really thought we had a glut of park rangers ffs?
I’ll use the Tim Miller standard, Democrats need to find candidates who can hang out comfortably at an SEC tailgate party.
The more they can act and especially talk like normal people the better. Those are real voters who care about real issues. Not progressive activists online.
This is true, but I think the emphasis on who you hang out with and how you talk can also serve as a way of detracting from the importance of policy stuff.
People have sincerely held views!
To Meghan's point, I think that, provided that they hew closer to your CSDM, Democrats are quite keen on emphasizing policy, more so than Republicans. But I can see room for improvement in being a natural in normie spheres who aren't polticial junkies.
I agree with Meghan (and you) that there’s a *lot* of room for improvement in this area. Most people aren’t political junkies and have muddled views on policy. A normal person who can frame policy goals in terms that normal people can relate to is a good candidate.
They do, but they need to feel comfortable with a candidate before that conversation even *begins* to form.
Do they? I'm not so sure.
Hi Meghan,
I didn't know the Securities and Exchange Commission threw tailgate parties! (Ok I'm being snarky, I genuinely don't know what SEC means in this context. Football something?)
Anyway, "just appeal to real people on real issues" is a great idea that starts to fall apart when you look at it more closely.
The New York Times ran a series of interviews/focus groups with undecided voters in swing states before the election. The vast majority of these voters came across as decent, sincere people. But they were, there's no other way of putting it, woefully lacking in understanding of how our political system works.
They demanded solutions to problems that would have required an all-powerful dictator, not a president, to fix. They complained about stuff that was controlled by forces greater than any politician (like, pandemic supply chain disruptions) or, conversely, they complained about issues that are a matter for state and local governments, not POTUS, to fix. They took position A in one sentence, and in the next sentence they took position B that directly contradicts A, and they never noticed the contradiction. They said things like "I just want us to get back to being kind and polite to each other" and in the next breath they'd say they consider voting for Trump, the most unkind and rude candidate probably ever in the history of POTUS elections.
This is not to say "don't listen to real voters," but their ideas have to make some semblance of sense and be tethered to reality.
As for the essence of your comment, unfortunately these are the voters we have to deal with, and dealing with them means being able to engage in a fair bit of bullshitting. Yes, I don't like it either, and it's one of many reasons why I'd be a terrible politician.
The Southeastern Conference is the highest tier of college football teams in the South. (And the fans of those teams are notoriously quite assertive in thinking they're they're the highest tier in CFB period.) I've made similar snarky jokes as you did here before, but to when Matt and others refer to the Securities and Exchange Commission: https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-incredibly-dumb-economic-mistake/comment/70950230 (Getting that joke does require a little bit of college sports knowledge, though.)
I think you're very overly charitable. Googling "SEC tailgate" would answer the question and be much faster than the lame joke, and it would also not play into the "nyah nyah sportsball!" pablum that helps us LOSE ALL THESE FUCKING IMPORTANT ELECTIONS.
Uh....the jokes are being made within the confines of Slow Boring, and not on a political campaign?
I'm struck by how I hear young men around me refer to each other sincerely as "bro" on a regular basis, young men of all racial backgrounds just casually talking--and someone pointed out that many progressives use "bro" pejoratively, especially online. We need to cut stuff like that out.
"The broiest bros that ever broed."
Indeed, these young men have been speaking "bro's" all their lives without realizing it.
Yeah. I want my politicians to share my hate for the SEC!
The SEC is by far the most dominant conference and leaves all the others in their dust. This is simply inarguable.
Oh wait. You mean you weren't talking about basketball?
While good this year, SEC basketball is severely overrated, and this will be borne out in the tourney.
Evidence?
https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/page/CBBblockbuster0103/sec-men-college-basketball-dominance-auburn-tennessee-florida
When I talk about overrated I mean things like the idea that the SEC could/should get all four 1-seeds.
The SEC is the best conference by a healthy margin this year, but is also overrated. The Big 12 has occupied this space in the past. If you avoid having terrible bottom feeders you create a situation where every loss has positive value.
The idea that Tennessee is 7-5 in conference yet deserves a 1-seed is absurd to me.
I feel pretty confident that we won't see more than one SEC team in the Final Four and no more than two in the Elite Eight. A team that the committee believes has 5/6 top teams in the country would be expected to surpass those results.
This! I wish I could like this a 1000 times.
A break with Bidenism means that firing a bunch of people who took part in the last debacle. I'm 100% for it.
Everyone who played along with open borders, defunding the police, crazy trans things, and making everything about race should be told they're getting thrown under the bus by a new crop who can credibly say "Those Democrats made mistakes that we're not going to repeat."
It's worth remembering that Kamala's actual positions in her campaign were pretty moderate, but people (correctly) couldn't look past her past record. She didn't lose on her positions. She lost on her history.
If you had put those new positions on a new face without the baggage, that president would be wagging their finger at Putin and leading Ukraine to victory right now.
New positions on a losing team is not enough. Time to tell some people their political careers are over.
Get Gavin on the phone.
This gets at something both Matt and fellow former Milan employer Liam Kerr have talked about — there is no “Democrats Inc.” centralized entity which makes it hard to enforce a “don’t hire people who made X bad decision” rule.
I'm suggest people like Matt could have/should have written an essay saying "We can't regain trust with voters as long as our leaders are people swing voters will never forgive."
Voters and donors can come out and say they're not backing anyone who took part in the worst positions.
People with an audience should be making this point if they think it's correct, not lamenting nothing can be done.
That would be the “Throw Joe Biden under the bus” take from a few weeks back. I’m in full agreement with that take.
What I’m saying is that trying to ice out staffers who covered up Biden’s mental decline is tricky because it takes one group deviating to break the “don’t hire” equilibrium and there’s only so much you can do to punish the defecting firm.
Do I think it would be good to not hire the people who helped cover up Biden’s mental decline for high-level roles in the future? Yes. But I think it’s more important that elected leaders acknowledge the mistake than to ensure that every single deputy junior advisor to the senior advisor to the WHCOS never gets a job at any politics-related firm.
I'm actually talking about current politicians and future candidates.
I live in California, and I've seen the decline over the last decade, so when people talk about Gavin running, I want to shake them.
The entire campaign would be non-stop commercials of SF turning into a failed state, and those would carry a punch.
It doesn't matter if Gavin adjusts his positions. He's so tainted by California's performance that he can't dig himself out of that hole.
Then we agree. I’m also not a Gavin fan.
He just gives big “I have children chained in the basement” vibes to me
I live in LA and I kind of like Gavin. I think he's smart and has generally pursued good policies.
I, too, want to shake people who talk about Gavin running. In the pantheon of dumb ideas.
At this point I would be satisfied with elected officials and senior staffers acknowledging the mistake and having some sort of plan or process that ensures this doesn’t happen again.
The "throw Biden under the bus" is a stupid misdirection. To the extent Biden was a problem, he's history and will never matter again. We have to attack the leftist crazies, not use Biden as a scapegoat. And if you think the "hiding of Biden's mental decline" will be an important issue to any voter in the future, well, I don't know what to tell you other than, nah.
But I do totally agree that this election conclusively proved that the American people will never ever elect an ageing guy who has clearly slipped a lot mentally.
"To the extent Biden was a problem, he's history and will never matter again."
I'm curious how you would reconcile that with Matt's comparison of Trump throwing Bush under the bus. Would you have said about Bush in 2009, "To the extent [Bush] was a problem, he's history and will never matter again. We have to attack the leftist crazies, not use [Bush] as a scapegoat."
The last line is such an absolute howler that it's hard to take the rest of your comment (which is 100% correct) even remotely seriously.
French Laundry private party during covid bullshit Gavin? That Gavin?
edit: probably I am an idiot who has not had enough coffee yet
He means get him on the phone to tell him his career is over. (I also interpreted it as you did on my first reading).
I think you're misreading the context: some people need to be told they are not running, so get Gavin on the phone to tell him that.
I'm not sure anyone outside of California takes a Newsome presidential campaign seriously at this point.
I really hope Californians don’t either.
We don’t.
Add the people who thought Biden was perfectly fine to run again to the list of firings.
In politics and other fields you often want the people around you to be absurdly loyal.
There should be a government employed doctor who reports to the cabinet on the president's health and isn't his personal doctor.
And yet it was that very insincerity that would allow leftists to look past the whole "Kamala is a cop" thing.
If she hadn't played along with all that stuff in 2020, then there would have been a much more robust left reaction against Harris as a candidate. The left (especially the Warrenite part rather than the Sandersite part) knows that their policy ideas aren't popular (they think that they will be popular when implemented as policy, and cite the ACA for that) so they expect to have a candidate whose past will convince them that the candidate is one of them but the candidate's public positions will be more moderate.
They expect the candidate to largely implement their public positions (which is why they don't think they are fooling the electorate), but to have instincts to push as far left as public opinion / political reality will allow - which requires the candidate to have internal beliefs well to the left of the public.
This is different from the more hardcore Sandersite left who expect candidates to make political statements of agreement with their left positions and to sell the left positions to the public - the candidate is a failure in messaging if they can't get voters to vote for those positions (which that part of the left holds as an article of faith are capable of being popular if messaged correctly).
As an aside, as defined here, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren themselves are neither Warrenites nor Sandersites: they're fine with a moderate who defines himself as a moderate, they're much more interested in substantive policy concessions than in "trusting" a candidate to believe the right things.
Gavin is definitely not going to appeal to working class voters. Hopefully John Fetterman fully recovers to the point where he can communicate effectively in a debate.
It's weird to call this "Bidenism" given that Biden has always been a center of the party guy and not some wild eyed leftist. It's more like a bank shot appellation, meaning that the party moved to the left and Biden, being in the center of the party, reflected that move.
Biden was a moderate in the 2020 primary campaign and only, against standard practice, moved to the left *after* winning the nomination. It's probably because he wanted to avoid the kind of tensions that afflicted the Hillary campaign facing disgruntled Bernie supporters and believed that keeping the Democratic coalition was the most important action needed to win in 2020.
Maybe that was wise and was needed for victory. I do wonder how history might have been different had Biden heeded his internal more moderate voice.
If Biden had just moved left after the primary and during the general campaign, it wouldn't have been great but probably would have worked out fine. But he kept moving left and governed much further left than people expected. It was the governance way more than the campaigning that turned people off.
A question that is honestly not meant to be snarky or despairing: does any of this matter for so long as the Republicans reliably win 60% of the national white male vote, as they reliably have in every election cycle, regardless of candidates, for, essentially, a quarter-century? In other words, exactly which voters comprise the key target audiences for Common Sense Democrats? While, standing to be corrected, I think it will still be awhile until we have the full Pew-run accurate demographic breakdown, we should still ask who are the reachable subset of the 1.5% of voters representing Trump's margin or the 236,000 swing-state voters who, had they voted differently, would have delivered Harris an electoral college victory (and popular vote loss - really something to imagine!). Are they cross-pressured white non-college-educated women? Hispanic men? The subset of Trump's seemingly increased vote among Black men not consisting of people in the military or employed in law enforcement? I don't mean to go from strategy to tactics, but I think that polarization may not be quite so elective as MY would like or quite so tractable by a D move to the center. The Democrats are a big-tent coalition now - everyone from Rockefeller Republicans to Maoists - so I think it is helpful to get some sense of who MY and the commentators think is movable.
I would think it’s more about turning out all the types who aren’t full MAGA, the ones who stayed home/those who are in the middle. Turnout was down in 2024. I would imagine the number of people in that group far outnumber the types who are now completely onboard the Trump train.
If you look closer at places like Miami (city proper), which had a huge shift towards republicans percentage-wise, it’s actually because 15-20 thousand some-odd democratic voters from 2020 stayed home, not that the GOP flipped all of them. The GOP did gain a few thousand, but if the Democrats had turned out roughly the same amount of people as 2020, or even 2016, it would not have been such a close result. Targeting those who, for whatever reason, tuned out and didn’t consider the democrats as viable this time, but aren’t necessarily wearing red hats, should be the goal imo.
I agree with you. I personally think Democrats have lost this group for at least a generation and will need to make it up by appealing very broadly to other demographics. I think they tried to do this in 2024 by being bullies about race and other identity matters, and it fell *incredibly* flat. But so did the more historically mainstream policy (re: the one of the aged Bidens and Pelosis of the world) of supporting Israel under any and all circumstances while they were mass bombing hospitals and schools in Gaza. So, there's clearly a lot of hairs to be split.
Did Gaza matter in this past election at all? Or any other foreign policy question? The two candidates were very different on their approach to foreign policy and some groups may have shifted their votes, but on balance it seems not to have mattered.
I don't think the *policy* question on Gaza mattered very much, for the reasons you state.
But I think the pro-Gaza protests, especially on college campuses, were negative for the Party. For right or wrong, the actions of the protesters and the ineffectual response by college administrators reflect on the Democratic Party.
Yes, this seems like a core problem where people who are not affiliated with a party directly are nevertheless seen as its representatives. The Democrats don’t have much direct influence on universities, and professors and students don’t feel any obligation to take into account electoral considerations. It would probably be better for everyone if both the Democrats and the universities made clear they are not affiliated with one another.
It is overused, as many references are, but I cannot think of a better opportunity for a Sista Souljah moment than the Gaza protesters.
Only Fetterman leaned into that stance. The rest of the politicians missed a perfect chance to make the message clear that those lunatics don't represent the views of the Party
Same. I think a "STFU and go back to class" message would have on net won votes.
Fetterman's favorability is up roughly 20 points since he just stopped acting like he believes everything that his Harvard-educated peers do and started trolling the leftmost of them.
He forms the empirical basis for most of my "just fuck the Groups over loudly and much else will sort itself out" stance.
Anyone who does lawless protest like blocking freeways and throwing soup on paintings should be Sista Souljahed to oblivion, regardless of their cause.
Ritchie Torres too, I think. And his star is in the ascendant.
I see it slightly differently, but it might end up looking the same. It's bad for the Democrats AND universities for them to be closely identified with each other when they actually aren't linked directly in any meaningful sense, since there isn't really any way to cause feedback or process information between them. Making that clear might be in some sense a Sister Souljah moment. This is probably a small restatement of MY (and others') idea that polarization is a choice in some circumstances.
And now Fetterman's staffers are quitting en masse, because a lot of people working for Democrats sincerely expect that the game is to elect empty suits who will work for their staffers.
Sure, that would be good, but the idea of joining forces with Bibi is deeply nauseating. I'm not sure if the Democrats could pull that off.
The problem in the Israel-Palestine conflict is that there are no good guys, and it splits the Democratic coalition but not the Republican. There really weren't good options for the Democrats here.
There's also the fact that large societies need to be able to have conversations where the results don't immediately turn into a political party losing and someone like Trump getting elected instead. We're going to become an ungovernable country or another Peronist has-been otherwise. We need to be able to say "it's bad that the administrative state is being dismantled and American science research capacity is being gutted to be filled with cronies" without that turning immediately into "Democrats only care about unelected bureaucrats."
100% they were
Weirdly, it seems that both strongly pro-Israel and strongly anti-Israel types turned against the democrats in this past election because of Gaza. I don’t know that it was hundreds of thousands of votes, but it was some prominent groups on both ends.
Yes, and it is possible that the anti-Israel types were fools. We'll see.
I don’t find it as obvious as Matt that the rejection of Biden was straightforwardly about policy, except on immigration. Perceptions of Biden seem tied up inextricably with his age, with led people to perceive him as weak and meant he wasn’t out there selling his policies and getting media attention for them. Perceptions of him were also impacted by inflation, which mostly was out of his control.
I think if Biden was 65 and inflation never exceeded 3%, but he otherwise enacted the same policies and used the similar rhetoric, he would have been much more popular and probably a favorite to win reelection. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to moderate on controversial issues, especially those trying to win in red states, but I’m not convinced that issue positioning is the main story here.
I tend to agree with this. I have a lot of relatives who voted for Trump and the two things I kept hearing from them were "Biden is senile" and "I really dislike illegal immigration."
Just moving more centrist on illegal immigration would help the Dems immensely.
voters: we'll vote for Trump over Biden, because Biden is old and senile
Biden: steps down, is replaced by Harris, who's 18 years younger than Trump
voters: we'll vote for the 78-year-old over the 60-year-old because reasons
I swear, that #MakeItMakeSense and IFeelLikeImTakingCrazyPills.gif are going to completely wear out from overuse at this rate
(Yes, I hear you on illegal immigration, Biden/Harris should have done something sooner)
I agree, it's nonsense. I feel like they thought Biden was still running in 2024.
Harris was almost a nonentity somehow; I really didn't hear a lot of complaints about her.
I would like more discussion of this point because of course voters care about policy--they want the economy to be good, crime to be low, and health care to be affordable!...which is not particularly insightful. I'm not sure most voters care or think much about policy beyond "I care about the economy, tariffs are related to the economy, therefore Trump must be good for the economy since he's proposing to do stuff related to the economy."
Biden's big dip in popularity started with his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and never recovered.
Also, the most credible research shows that Biden's extra Stimulus added about 3% to the inflation rate.
Just as important once that inflation started showing up, did Biden change course? Did he pull back the extra giveaways (I mean stimulus). Of course not, he denied inflation was happening, and kept shoveling money out the door.
How do you explain that Democrats lost majorities in the Senate and House?
I think you’re underrating how much Dan Osborn tried to pander to the leftists. He cited Matt Stoller’s book “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy” as his inspiration that propelled him to run for Congress: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/opinion/nebraska-senate-dan-osborn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Now, Stoller himself is “anti-woke”. But Ryan Grim (Dropsite News) and Krystal Ball type Bernie deadenders have articulated a willingness to expand the tent to ppl who have different views on cultural issues like abortion, crime, and immigration as long as Dems impose stricter litmus tests on Econ and foreign policy. I’m not surprised they like Osborn. There’s def a strand of Econ leftists (Faiz Shakir recently) who view maximal cultural progressivism as a psyop by Hilary Clinton types to prevent expansion of the welfare state.
That's a fair point. I'm just saying, they were willing to settle for "Osborn agrees with us about this one thing." Forget culture, forget climate change, they weren't demanding he come out for Medicare for All or say we should abolish billionaires or whatever else the Bernie 2020 crew was after.
I think it’s because they viewed him as an opportunity to re-orient the main axis of conflict in American politics to be around class issues. Even heterodox Fetterman when confronted on the View if he’s planning to switch parties, resorted to his support for LGTB rights and abortion as to why he’s still a Dem. When asked about what drives Osborn’s politics, he emphasizes labor issues.
As you know, certain leftists care as much if not more about the type of coalition one assembles as they do about winning elections. They value getting back the Obama to Trump voter more than persuading the Romney to Clinton voters. Imo that’s what explains the Osborn love.
I don’t know if we can say that’s Osborn pandering or his sincere views on monopoly. I think Matt Stoller is incredibly annoying and a sloppy analyst who sees anything and everything through the lens of anti-monopoly, but it’s also true that anti-monopoly views are widely held, including by many conservatives. Just for most people they aren’t the be all and end all.
I think Osborn would have been closer to Josh Hawley than Elizabeth Warren if he actually became a US Senator.
If leftists are fine with that, so be it!
If he won’t vote against a Democratic majority leader, that’s sufficient.
I think he would’ve been more like Sherrod Brown, than either Elizabeth Warren or Josh Hawley tbh
I think this is a little unfair, Osborn’s essentially pro-choice for one in the sense that he’s personally against abortion but thinks it should be left to the women and her doctor.
"Just for most people they aren’t the be all and end all."
So, you're saying that they shouldn't monopolize our attention?
It seems common to see anti-monopoly policies as an intellectually lazy "one weird trick" to solve inequality without having to make any compromises.
I will defend anti-monopoly policies as a long-run complement to other economic-left policies. Break up monopolies -> less monopoly rent -> big business interests and the super-rich have less money to buy media and politicians -> less structural resistance to subsequent redistribution, public services etc.
They're liberal but not left - not neoliberal, not whatever people mean by "liberal" in the modern sense, but what people meant by liberal when they'd call TR a liberal. Can I coin "archaeoliberal" for this tendency?
They are something that liberals of the right and of the left can agree on.
Sure, I was just pointing out that certain leftists care as much if not more about the type of coalition one assembles as they do about winning elections. They value getting back the Obama to Trump voter more than persuading the Romney to Clinton voters. Hence, the Osborn love.
They want to re-orient the main axis of conflict to be around class issues so are open to expanding the tent through cultural moderation as long as they can get rid of fiscal moderates and *neocons*. This is not representative of the left but is true of the ppl Matt cites in his piece as “leftist”. Here is a tweet from Ryan Grim (of Dropsite News):
“DEI was an active impediment to the project of building a multiracial working class movement capable of taking on corporate and oligarch power. Rufo did the left a favor in nuking it.”
https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1882143755429683314
Now note that foreign policy is *essentially* a culture-war issue, so this "compromise" is not, in fact, much of a compromise at all.
Is it rlly a culture war issue besides Israel-Palestine? On most cultural war issues, the parties are neatly divided. That’s not true for foreign policy, and it’s certainly not obvious that the Obama-Trump voters in 2016 were turned off by Dem military dovishness as they were about say immigration. In fact, I think there’s more factional differences within parties and some overlap between left wing ppl who think our interventionist foreign policy is harmful to foreigners and America Firsters who think we should disengage bc it’s harmful to our own interests.
I think foreign policy consensus is mostly on the elite level. Even on Israel-Pal, I think it’s more generational than partisan. I would wager there are more older Dems who want to send aid to Israel than there are younger Republicans.
Yes, this is an interesting position that says people should be all in for socialism and disregard human rights and liberal thought otherwise.
It’s an interesting position which dominated a large swath of Eurasia from 1917-1991.
Correct, why is why it is a little surprising to see it emerge recently.
It’s emerging because a lot of these folks were born after 1991.
They think human rights and liberal thought are downstream of socialism.
I think it's relevant that the Democratic collapse in the Senate, state legislatures, and in red states generally began under Obama--who I agree governed as a moderate. To me, that really complicates the notion that Democrats became unviable in such places because of post-Obama departures into DEI Land.
Yeah i think it has way more to do with the nationalization of politics than the way any particular democrat governed or ran, to be honest. West Virginians don't really care about the guy who brings home the bacon- they want a loyal soldier for their political values which are insanely right wing.
IIRC that also coincided in time with banning pork-barrel spending.
This chart only tracks elections held the same year as presidential elections (so it misses midterm elections) but it looks like there was a gradual decrease in ticket splitting over several decades that only fully disappeared in the Trump elections (though the 2024 election had nearly as much as the two Obama elections): https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/the-postwar-history-of-senate-presidential-ticket-splitting-part-one/
The dropoff was so sudden with Trump (from 7-8 to 0), that it makes me wonder if it will come back when he's gone.
It came back to 4 this year! And the 7-8 included Bernie Sanders and Angus King as “ticket splits” from going for Democrats for president.
Ya think? I think that was just the Southern Strategy fully realized, which was always going to take a generation or two while those Dixiecrats who always voted for a Dem out of habit died off.
The Democrat majority Obama started with was an anomaly brought on by the great recession.
Also, while Obama was certainly a LOT more moderate than Biden, he was definitely more liberal than Bill Clinton, and drifted further left over those 8 years.
I'm pretty disillusioned with all this. Why don't we just get a television star to fart in people's faces or something? The idea that voters are being driven by sincere policy views, especially in a presidential election, doesn't seem to be substantiated. In a world where nothing matters and nobody cares about anything, you get authoritarianism, farce, or both.
I don't think it's true that Republicans voters aren't motivated by policy views. Their party is not motivated by making concrete plans for imposing those policies, rather than the political battle over the policies themselves.
But I do think that Republicans' concerns over illegal border crossings and gender/race ideology in school, for example, are genuine.
Then why is the narrative that inflation was the main driver this election? And the Biden admin and the party did pivot on immigration (but definitely way too late).
I've commented here before that if inflation really was the main issue, voters wouldn't have voted for Trump, as his policy agenda will do nothing to calm it and will actually just make it worse. People replied saying that's because the average voter doesn't understand tariffs or economic policy.
Fair enough. But if the voters don't understand or care about policy, then why all this handwringing about the correct policy platform going forward? The OP is right. I like Matt, but I think his manifesto is just missing the forest for the trees. The policies matter way less than the personalities.
Biden/Harris did pivot on immigration...sure. But, again, that pivot did not come across as genuine. Too little, too late. And this was after years of being lectured that "nobody is illegal", and that undocumented immigrants are essential for the economy, and that it doesn't matter how people came here. Voters felt they could trust Republicans on this issue more.
On inflation, voters could point to the large amount of spending and the years the Democrats were insisting that inflation was only due to supply chain issues.
I agree with you on inflation that Trump's policies don't make sense if you care about inflation. But you're conflating "don't understand" with "don't care about". Those aren't the same things.
Them not being the same thing doesn't really change the logic of policy positioning ultimately being a secondary consideration. Biden and the Democrats being untrustworthy on immigration might be true, but considering his opponent is a convicted felon and demonstrable pathological liar, it seems like a small quibble, and ultimately backwards reasoning.
US politics are basically just high school. Things are popular and salient until their not. The majority of the country was against gay marriage and immigration until they suddenly weren't, in a span of a single administration, and now the pendulum is swinging back. Democrats just need a slightly more moral, less unhinged candidate with lots of name recognition and who looks good on TV, those are by far the most important.
It sucks, because I'm here to read Matt, who I agree with, both substantively and in his approach. But people like him aren't the ones who win class president. Because it's just high school all the way down, and the Democrats currently aren't the cool kids like they were in 2008.
But don't you see, Trump voters cared more about immigration than Trump lying. For them immigration policy wasn't a quibble.
I mean if people wanted a more moral, less unhinged candidate with lots of name recognition and who looks good on TV, Kamala should have won. That describes her perfectly. Yet she didn't win.
No this is a bad reading. The biggest criticism of Kamala was always that she was extremely unpopular, which is a rare achievement for a VP.
That's the insight. Policies aren't popular, people are, and then those popular people change the narrative. The Republican party used to be in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship until Trump changed that. You could say it's because the population had a wellspring of nativist sentiment. But I actually think Trump himself is responsible for shifting the window on the issue, and mostly because he ended up being more popular than Jeb and Rubio in 2016.
Maybe the Biden/Harris pivot was too late and they were punished for that. But why wasn't Trump punished for his effort to sabotage the bipartisan bill to address the problem?
Sometimes it just seems that the voters are amorphously angry at their elected leaders and want to lash out. Like Marlon Brando asked what he was rebelling against and saying "Whatcha got?"
People don’t vote for someone because they are in fact proposing better policy on the issue that matters - they vote against the incumbent because they think the incumbent is bad.
Just like all the people who say things are so awful they’d rather tear it all down than try something better, not realizing how much worse it could get.
Voters don't necessarily know that Trump was going to drive up inflation, but it is true that inflation went up under Biden (not all his fault)
Having good policy planks may not help as much as we'd like on getting _initially_ elected, but if you have a better policy you'll probably get better outcomes and then you're much more likely to get re-elected.
I didn't say Republicans. Trump is funny and Harris was boring and every other take about the election is made up out of whole cloth or heavily retrofitted when the real explanation is way simpler. This is all dumb and fake. If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said illegal immigrants are actually good and he loves trans people, his polling wouldn't change a bit. Congressional republicans wouldn't even disagree with him publicly. We need to adapt to this reality instead of pretending
THANK YOU
I don't want to be as pessimistic as you. This is my home! I don't just want to concede it to the MAGA forever and shrug and say, "welp, elections are unwinnable, we are screwed."
But there is something to what you say. Trump mimed giving a blow job to a mic at a campaign rally. He swayed to music for half an hour instead of giving a speech. And he got elected.
If Trump had farted in people's faces in public, his followers would declare it the best, greatest fart anyone has ever seen, and swing voters would shrug and say, meh, who cares, my eggs are too f**king expensive and I vaguely remember the economy being better under Trump in 2019, I'll probably vote for him!
+eleventy gigazillion on your last sentence; also, Old Ben Franklin was way ahead of you: "[our form of government] can only end in Despotism ... when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
I'd probably agree voters aren't driven by policy ... but they are clearly driven by issues. Trump won the economy and immigration. Harris won health care and the supreme court. The economy won this time. I think that's the Dems. big Achilles heel and also why I'm so interested in how Gov. Polis seems to have taken back this issue with small but consistent tax cuts. He's hyper focused on fiscal responsibility. In the same way Trump took entitlement spending off the table, I think the path forward for Democrats is fiscal responsibility. Which should be easy since all Trump is going to do is further balloon the deficit.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/
There's nothing more boring and lame than the guy who talks about fiscal responsibility. What a loser. The voters like the guy who makes blowjob jokes with the mic. That guy is funny
I know. Gosh. This guy was the worst, right?
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-fiscal-responsibility
Every politician says we should be fiscally responsible, but few make it the center of their political identity. Obama certainly did not. Doing so is not any path forward it's a farce.
Trump had no real economic policy, it was all vibes based nonsense.
And yet still ... Trump won on the economy. That's how bad the Dems' messaging problem is.
This is I think the synthesis between "policy positioning is important" and "voters don't care about policy. What mostly matters is how candidates frame and position themselves with issues voters already care about rather than the specific technocratic details of public policy. Polis being perceived as the guy who is trying to cut taxes is probably more important than actually cutting taxes. This actually sucks in some sense, since it means framing/positioning is more important than delivering outcomes.
Policy scholars might call this something resembling a Narrative Policy Framework approach to policymaking:
https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/policy-in-500-words-the-narrative-policy-framework/
The NPF seeks to measure how narratives are used in policymaking. Narratives are stylized accounts of the origins, aims, and likely impacts of policies. They are used strategically to reinforce or oppose policy measures. Narratives have a setting, characters, plot, and moral. They can be compared to marketing, as persuasion based more on appealing to an audience’s beliefs than on the ‘facts’. People will pay attention to certain narratives because they are boundedly rational, seeking shortcuts to gather sufficient information, and prone to accept simple stories that confirm their biases, exploit their emotions, and/or come from a source they trust.
To make a point that Yglesias himself has made, if "nothing" matters then why did Trump say that he would not sign a national abortion ban? He loudly said he would be pro IVF. He also said he would protect Social Security. Now he may renege on all of those but those were his stated positions during the campaign. Do you think he would have still won if he had taken the opposite of those stances?
Yes. I think he would've won if he said that, and that immigrants were the lifeblood of the country and trans women should play in sports and Ukraine deserves all the support in the world. As long as he winked afterward and made blowjob jokes. Gun to my head I am completely serious that's what I think.
"Hello, Taylor? Okay, hear us out and let us describe the whole plan before you say anything..."
It is ironic that it is Trump's government that is trying to undo congestion pricing in NYC. But it is crazy that the federal government has any say whatsoever in whether NYC charges cars to drive on its streets. And this reinforces the idea that the whole bloated, lawyerly, corrupt system is due for some major trimming.
Genuinely curious: Where DOES the federal government get the authority to have any say in this matter?
Sean Duffy's letter to Governor Hochul says that congestion pricing is a pilot project of the Value Pricing Pilot Program of the DoT.
As I was saying...
Does the federal government not get involved in many local issues? It acts as a parent that gives their 19 year old child money.
"But it also doesn’t really make sense to recruit candidates who are moderate on those issues if Democrats, as a party, are going to say that climate change will lead to human extinction or that all DEI critics are aiming to re-impose segregation" Shots fired at Jamelle Bouie.
I have to say, I think this is pretty unfair to Jamelle here. I'm with you that his rhetorical flourish at the end calling this Trump administration attack on DEI a new segregation is way too much. But that's partly because it detracts from the first 80% of the column; which as far as I can tell you pretty much agree with.
In his column he notes "To a certain set of well-meaning cultural liberals, D.E.I. refers mainly to H.R. mandates and ineffectual diversity training." He actually links to an article noting D.E.I trainings are pretty ineffective. He also notes that there is a lot of left wing critique that DEI is just theater companies do without actually doing anything to change the diversity at a company (a critique I'm pretty sure you share...I know I share).
And then probably the thesis of the entire column "But then we have to remember that D.E.I. also means something to people on the political right, from the reactionaries who lead the White House to the propagandists who carry their message to the masses. For them, D.E.I. is less “white fragility” and silly posters about “white supremacy culture” than it is the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position.".
Like again, I'm pretty sure you agree with this. He takes a swipe at "white fragility" indicating he's pretty with you that Tema Okun and Robin DeAngelo have some pretty dumb ideas they're putting out. And then he lays out all the ways the administration is going after diversity itself; like Pete Hesgeth declaring the end of recognizing Black History Month. And then he notes "Attorney General Pam Bondi has instructed the agency to target private-sector diversity programs for potential “criminal investigation.” Like Yikes! I think Jamelle is right to point out how gross this is. Even if you take a pretty dim view DEI trainings (and I do take dim view generally), the idea DOJ should be threatening private companies for having these trainings is asinine. Again, I'm pretty sure you agree with the specific points he's making here.
Matt I know you're gotten a lot of pretty unfair flack from people to your left. Especially people on the more environmental left. So I get the urge to punch a left a bit. But I think you might be taking it a bit too far here.
It’s interesting that you only see this from one side. Many companies didn’t want to do DEI in the first place but did because they felt had they had to as protection against legal action. It’s asinine what the left has done using government power to advance their politics. I’m hearing a lot of people on the left say now that they don’t really support DEI BUT….. then go into some rant about how anti-DEI is bad. I’m not buying it.
I don’t support organized religion in the abstract, and I find it disgusting that churches and individual clergy of all kinds have used their various legal protections and tax breaks as well a good dose of sanctimonious nonsense to get away with and cover up heinous crimes.
However, if an administration took power and promised to end those abuses by issuing a bunch of menacing Executive Orders and issuing memos about rooting out religious influence from every aspect of life, and also engaged in thinly veiled threats on the side (“we want clergy to not go to work because they’re traumatized”), I would oppose that. Two wrongs don’t make a right in this case.
The Trump administration‘s assault on DEI is top to bottom bad faith - if there’s a principled objection to DEI in there, it’s buried under bloodthirsty vindictiveness. They want people to suffer, and they’ve said so. And they are absolutely not going to stop at DEI: it’s either going to turn into a McCarthy-style witch hunt or they’ll get bored and find a new and probably adjacent target for their rage.
DEI is bad. It is the first hobby horse I got on in this space. Before Rufo, Before Matt found his voice on this, before the Right took it on and developed their cancel culture bullshit. I said the emperor was buck naked the first time I saw him shaking his bare ass.
So sure Trump is bad too. But he’s right on this. I support it. You either want it gone or you don’t.
Again: we want it gone, but we also think the black people in our workplaces were hired on merit and deserve to keep their jobs.
" but we also think the black people in our workplaces were hired on merit"
DEI makes people not believe that.
I already said I want it gone!
Agreed
"I don't like enforced diversity trainings and I also don't like firing black people for being diversity hires" is a perfectly coherent position!
I agree with this. Is there a Black person you know that has been fired for being a diversity hire? I’d be interested in learning about that circumstance. That would be bad - if true and not supported with other pertinent facts.
As I understand it, the Pam Bondi focus isn't on the training programs, but on DEI programs that work as discrimination against white people and asian people.
Bouie mentions favorably a program that would provide grants exclusively to Black women entrepreneurs while also saying that the administration's attack on DEI is about "reimposing hierarchies of race and gender onto American society." I think one can oppose the first without wanting the second. I read Bouie's essay as disagreeing with me.
The problem is of course she was deliberately vague in what she meant. Which I'm sure is the point so as to no run afoul of the inevitable court case if/when she does bring a suit.
But again context matters here. First, based on actions taken in other parts of the Trump administration, it's extraordinarily clear that actions taken go way way beyond dismantling the most cringe DEI training programs.
And unlike the first administration, Trump is surrounded by loyalists who want to do anything to kiss his butt. I think it's absolutely reasonable to assume Bondi, Hesgeth (and likely Patel) are acting in accordance with Trump's wishes and beliefs (or that they were chosen because they happen to align with Trump's view of the world which I think is part of the motivation for why someone completely unqualified like Hesgeth was picked as SecDef). And this is a man who blamed a plane crash in DC on "DEI"; an absolutely rancid and ludicrous statement. Just a perfect encapsulation of Bouie's point that "DEI" is being used as cudgel to go way beyond specific training programs (honestly surprised Bouie didn't bring up this example as it's the most obvious piece of evidence to me to support the part of his thesis that doesn't involve saying this is the new segregation; which again I agree with Matt this part of the column went too far in it's argument).
Also, Bondi is also the person who dropped an investigation into the shadiness of Trump university after getting a hefty donation.
I think what I'm getting at is while you're right to note that in a vacuum you can see Bondi's statement has at least a somewhat good faith attempt to root out possible actual discrimination against white employees. But in context, I think myself and Bouie have a lot of ground to say a more cynical interpretation is called for here. Proof is obviously in the pudding. Given there is some sign Trump's poll numbers are starting to drop, who knows how much pivoting is going to happen soon to a less radical agenda (especially with everything going on budget wise that Matt and Brian go into today on the podcast).
"for them, D.E.I. is less “white fragility” and silly posters about “white supremacy culture” than it is the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position."."
except of course this is flat out bullshit and wrong.
Democrats won the fight for "equality" Republicans bought into that. Then Democrats changed it from equality to equity.
Equity is just another name for affirmative action. It says that if you have X percent of the population, then you should have X percent of a job, or on a board. There's is STRONG disagreement against that position.
And it leads to nonsense like we need to put more white people in the NBA because of equity.
"except of course this is flat out bullshit and wrong"
I think the sense in which the statement "for them...it is the mere presence [of a non-white male]" is NOT bullshit can be seen more plainly when someone is labelled "a DEI" and then described as though their identity makes it self-evident they must be unqualified.
Like what happened with the pilot on the Black Hawk crash at DCA. "See, Trump was right all along - it turns out the pilot is a *woman*. No further details needed."
It's understandable that affirmative action makes people question whether someone truly earned their "spot", meaning there might have been a better candidate who was passed over. This objection is not about "mere presence", and it's not fair or useful to characterize it that way.
But a healthy subset of objectors to DEI, like Trump, do seem to slide quite easily into "mere presence" arguments at the first opportunity.
I always think I'm in the minority in this comment section that I seem to like takes from Matt Y and Jamelle Bouie on many things.
One diametrically opposed take from Jamelle that I think Matt and other centrist democrats should grapple with more is his criticism that the center left tends to believe "that public opinion cannot be shaped or mobilized or moved, only reacted to." I see echoes of this in today's MattY piece where he mentions the power of Trump the individual to change the party and how polarization is not a purely structural foregone conclusion. Yes Trump moderated on key issues, but he also is doing things that no Republican would agree with even a month ago (becoming pro-Kremlin) and yet they all fall in line and it BECOMES their opinion.
"but he also is doing things that no Republican would agree with even a month ago (becoming pro-Kremlin) and yet they all fall in line and it BECOMES their opinion."
I would think Matt's response would be that these are incredibly unpopular moves and will be a significant negative for Trump. Will some portion of the base adopt these opinions - yes. Just like some part of the Democratic base adopted "white fragility." But outside that base, broadcasting unpopular opinions makes you less popular as a politician.
So first, one of the reasons I admonished Matt a little bit is that him and Jamelle actually probably agree on like 80% of issues. In fact even within the Democratic coalition they probably agree more than disagree (Jamelle has written a lot about the problems of NIMBYism in his hometown of Charlottesville for example). So part of this was a call from me to say "Hey, no need to attack someone who's ultimately an ally".
Second, I think one of the striking things with Biden is how much he didn't seem to shape Democratic opinion on anything. As has now been noted at nauseum (not just here), more lefty staffers seemed to push Biden rather than other way around (just seems clear that Biden's real calling was probably to be senate majority leader where his sort of coalitional bridge building would be most effective). Reality is most presidents end effecting opinion of their party on a variety of measures. For example, Matt has brought up Obama's moderate position on gay marriage a number of times. There was a very noticeable poll bump among registered Democrats supporting gay marriage.
I should say this is one of the reasons that I have such a hard time with these political prognostications about voting coalitions in 2028. While I agree with Matt, Democratic party should allow more moderates to run for senate if they want to win. I think he's under estimating how much voting coalitions and how states vote can change faster than we think. Hispanic vote swung way to the right in a manner I think no one would have predicted in 2016 given how much of Trump's campaign was built around some pretty bigoted rhetoric around people from Central and South America. I went to school in Virginia and when I was in college, Virginia was not just a "red" state but a pretty solidly "red" state. And now it's basically the opposite (8-10% red when I was in college, 8-10% blue now).
Trying to figure out whatever issue is going to matter in the election four years later is often a mug's game. I mean the perfect example of what I'm talking about is the GOP autopsy right after the 2012 election. Like almost literally a version of Matt's argument about moderation but from a right of center angle, including moderating rhetoric and policy around immigration. So instead a candidate does the complete opposite in 2016...and wins. Now not saying the move is to swing far to the left on a particular issue is the move here (a mistake the left wing I think made when they saw Trump swung way to the right on immigration and won), but rather figuring out what issue is going to be the zeitgeist issue four years from now that changes voting coalitions is basically an impossibility.
Eh, I was unsure about that, but this bit pushed me into not objecting:
"To concede that this administration has a point about D.E.I., as some of Trump’s opponents have, is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law."
More importantly than holding the "Common Sense Democrats" positions imo is the ability to do so authentically and in plain English. When I think of authentic and plain English, the first politician I think of is AOC (even though I personally her policy positions are too far to the left).
Too many mainstream Democrats aren't able to be authentic and aren't able to speak to voters in a normal way. If the moderate lane can't do this, then I fear we will be stuck with AOC in 2028, and Matt's agenda will be for naught.
Fewer lawyers, people who have worked in nonprofits their whole careers, career politicians. More businesspeople and people who have worked normal jobs.
Like many people who have a history of donating to Democratic candidates, I get a lot of random text messages from people running for office. Yesterday I got one from someone who touted his biography as an "activist and substitute teacher." No offense against the guy -- he might be great, I know nothing about him -- but it really turned me off.
Problem is, elected office is career progress for that person, but much less likely so for the type of people I want to elect.
You’re gonna need to lose multiple elections to clean up the current mess. The current group is too far left. Until a real centrist group of dems comes forward, you have lost centrists like myself.
AOC 2028 is the saved timeline thought.